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A YOUNG MAN’S 
QUESTIONS 


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ROBERT Y SPEER 


Author of 
Missionary Principles and Practice, 
Man Christ Jesus, etc., etc, 


A YOUNG MAN’S 
QUESTIONS 
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New York Chicag. Toronto 
Fleming H. Revell Company 
London and Edinburgh 


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Copyright, 1903, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 63 Washington Street 
Toronto: 27 Richmond Street W 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 30 St. Mary Street 


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PREFACE 


Tue character of this little book is 
clearly enough indicated by its title and 
the table of contents. Very probably 
the ideals which it maintains will be 
distasteful tosome. They will say that it 
cramps pleasure and narrows life. This 
is a mistake. This little book is written 
in the interests of freedom and the 
largest life. Its counsel to young men 
is to stand fast in the liberty with which 
Christ has made men free, and to refuse 
enslavement under any yoke of bondage. 
Its appeal to them is the appeal of Paul 
to Timothy: “No soldier on service 
entangleth himself in the affairs of this 
life; that he may please Him who en- 
rolled him asa soldier. And if also a 
man contend in the games he is not 
crowned, except he have contended 
lawfully.” 


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CHAPTER 


us 
II. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
What Area Young Man's Questions? 9 
Why a Young Man Should Be a 
Christian ‘ . = . rey 
. Shall I join the Church? . - 40 
. The Young Man’s Duty to Spread 
His Religion . : - - 5 653 
. As to Observing Sunday . + 70 
. His Companions Lae ‘ - 82 
. Shall I Drink? . om ite ° Of 
. Shall I Smoke ? - . . + 102 
. Astothe Theater. . ‘ . 114 
. The Young Man and Money . =, EAT 
. Is It Wrong to Bet? . - ° + 137 
. His Amusements. F - 169 
. Menand Women ° - + 186 
. His Reading . : = - - 196 
. A Young Man’s Work in the World . 208 


Otte eeeel 


A Young Man’s Questions 


I 


WHAT ARE A YOUNG MAN’S 
QUESTIONS ? 


Wuaart troubles one man does not trou- 
ble another at all. There are many to 
whom some courses of action are impos- 
sible. It never occurs to them to adopt 
such ,courses. To others these same 
courses of action seem most natural and 
ordinary. It does not occur to them that 
they may be wrong. Men do not all have 
the same standards, and they do not differ 
from one another merely in the degree of 
success or failure with which they con- 
form to these standards. Their stan- 
dards differ, differ so widely that one man 
suffers torture at the thought of doing 
what to another man is easy and unques- 
tionable. Young men do not, accordingly, 
ask themselves the same questions. 

9 


10 A Young Man’s Questions 


A man’s inheritance, earnestness of 
purpose, integrity of character and atmos- 
phere of life, enter into the determination 
of what his moral and social and intel- 
lectual problems will be, and of what will 
be his solutions of his problems. We 
easily underestimate the importance of 
the last of these. The atmosphere of life 
with many men is such that many ques- 
tions are prohibited from ever arising in 
it. - There are thousands of men, for ex- 
ample, who are so set in habits of abso- 
lute probity and the tone of whose life 
is so high and worthy that the chance to 
take ten thousand dollars unobserved and 
with the perfect assurance of concealment 
would never be observed by them, or, if 
observed, would not raise the slightest 
perceivable temptation. It is the very sal- 
vation and joy of life to a young man to 
live in an atmosphere like this. We would 
do well to think more upon it. 

In his notebook, Phillips Brooks jotted 
down some thought of his about a man’s 
moral atmosphere when he was returning 
from Europe in 1883: “ Nature of tem- 


What Are They? 11 


per in general—distinct from principle, 
belief, or action. The clear recognisable- 
ness of it in people’s thoughts; the at- 
mosphere or aroma of a life; the frequent 
idea of irresponsibility for temper; value 
of heredity. People talk as if it were 
just discovered. Moses ‘ from fathers to 
children.’ The beauty of such connection 
with all its frequent tragicalness.” It is 
this underlying cast of character which 
determines a young man’s questions for 
him far more than the external surround- 
ings and associations of his life. 

Yet these do enter, and enter be- 
cause they have such power to affect the 
inner dispositions. A young man who 
goes with a fast set is forced to face ques- 
tions which another man, whose tastes 
are high and serious, and whose com- 
panions are thoughtful and earnest men, 
is not troubled with. A young man 
comes out of his room in some eastern 
city, or some western town, where he has 
just read a letter from his mother, at 
home. The sweetness of his mother’s 
influence is upon his heart, and he is 


12 A Young Man’s Questions 


thinking tenderly of her and of the past, 
and all the scenes of his wholesome boy- 
hood crowd back into his heart. In that 
frame of mind nothing could tempt him 
to impurity. 

But a companion persuades him to go 
to the theater. I am not raising yet the 
question whether it is right for the young 
man to go to the theater, but am sug- 
gesting only the influence of the atmos- 
phere of life as creating our questions for 
us, and determining our behaviour toward 
them. The warmth of colour and life and 
the excitement of the play make it easy 
for the young man to slip from the thea- 
ter to the saloon, or to the friend’s room 
for a glass of wine. And then it is easy 
to take another step, which would have 
been impossible as he came out of his 
room, fresh from the touch of his moth- 
er’s love and the mother’s ideals for her 
boy. In this sense each man is not only, as 
Robert Louis Stevenson said, “his own 
judge and mountain guide through life,” 
but he makes his own code and his own 
mountains, too. 


What Are They? 13 


But this is not altogether true. A 
course of action may be very question- 
able, and yet a man may pursue it with- 
out question. It does not alter the char- 
acter of wrong or folly to allege that men 
follow them unconsciously. If a blind 
man of high character should walk off 
the cliff into Niagara Rapids, his blind- 
ness and high character would not in the 
least affect the law of gravitation, or 
save him from drowning in the stream. 
And while one man may be able to stand 
more folly or wrongdoing than another, 
before he begins to show the conse- 
quences, yet the moral character of his 
course is not in the least altered thereby. 
There are certain questions which remain 
questions no matter how much men may 
assume that they are not questions. And 
men will be held responsible for their 
conduct in regard to them whether they 
have ever considered them as really ques- 
tions of moral interest or not. 

Very many of the questions of a young 
man’s life, however, are not questions of 
a gross character. He has problems to 


14 A Young Man’s Questions 


face besides the elementary problems of 
morality. There are questions of propri- 
ety, of expediency, of honour, of courtesy, 
of prudence. There are issues where 
the opposing courses may both be inno- 
cent in themselves, and where the judg- 
ment must turn upon consequences, upon 
ultimate influence on character and per- 
sonal power. As the writer of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews points out, there are 
weights as well as sins to be stripped off 
in order to run an unimpeded race. 
Every young man reveals his character 
in his determination of what things shall 
constitute his problems. If he takes cer- 
tain judgments and habits and tastes for 
granted, and feels no moral scruples over 
them, he shows the sort of man he truly 
is. If he stops at these courses and de- 
liberates, insisting thus that they cannot 
be taken for granted as the proper thing 
for a man, but must be honestly scrutin- 
ised; or if he, on the other hand, sum- 
marily shuts the door on all low and 
worthless or enslaving ways, whether of 
body or of mind; he reveals himself as 


What Are They? 16 


well as his attitude on these particular 
questions. There is a character of easy 
acceptance of conventional customs and 
of common standards. There is another 
character of independence and coura- 
geousness which strikes out its own 
courses, and prefers what is right to 
what is easy; and even beyond this, 
insists upon reading a moral significance 
in everything. 

Two of the supreme things for a young 
man to keep in mind in thinking upon his 
questions are just these—freedom and 
courage. It is always unfortunate to lose 
independence. Men often sneer at high 
standards on the ground that they are 
slavish, and that it is far more manly to 
lead a free life. But this is a foolish and 
an untrue use of words. Take the habit 
of drink, as an illustration. The mode- 
rate drinker says he likes a man who is 
free—free to drink. But the total ab- 
stainer is free to drink when he wants to. 
The drinker, even the moderate drinker, 
is not free to stop drinking when he wants 
to. Which of them is the free man? The 


16 A Young Man’s Questions 


abstainer is free either to drink, or not to 
drink. The drinker is free simply to 
drink. It is best to decide all the ques- 
tions of life so as to retain the greatest 
measure of real freedom. And he is the 
freest man whose habit makes him free 
from the habits which make men slaves. 

One of the great questions of our 
’ lives is our rights and the use we shall 
make of them. Law books and books on 
political science give a great deal of space 
to rights, their definition, their division. 
Scores of pages are used in these discus- 
sions by ex-President Woolsey, of Yale, 
in his two big volumes on “ Political Sci- 
ence,” and he concludes the chapter by 
dividing rights into seven classes. Black- 
stone’s discussion and division are both 
shorter. With him there are two kinds of 
rights, absolute and relative. 

Jesus, too, taught about rights, and He 
suggested a division which most people 
have never thought of. First, there are 
rights which we have no right to surren- 
der; and, second, there are rights which 
we have a right to forego. It was after 


What Are They? Y, 


the Transfiguration. He had come down 
from the mountain top, and when He was 
come to Capernaum was met with the 
question of the temple tribute. Every 
spring each Jew about twenty years of 
age was expected to pay a tax of about 
thirty cents, in our money, for the main- 
tenance of the temple. The collector 
asked Peter whether Jesus would pay 
this, the time for its payment having long 
passed. Peter said at once that He would. 
On reaching their house Jesus asked 
Peter: “ What thinkest thou, Simon? 
the kings of the earth, from whom do 
they receive toll or tribute? from their 
sons, or from strangers?” When Peter 
said, “From strangers,’ Jesus said to 
him, “ Therefore, the sons are free. 
But—” That was Jesus’ way of saying 
that he had a right to refrain from paying 
this tax, but he would surrender this 
right. People would not understand. It 
would cause “ stumbling.” 

So we have rights which we may fore- 
go. As ex-President Woolsey says: 
“Rights may be waived. The very na- 


18 A Young Man’s Questions 


ture of a right implies that the subject 
of it decides whether he should exercise 
it or not.” For example, I get on a 
street car and pay my fare and take the 
last empty seat. A poor, sick woman, 
carrying a child, gets on next, and no 
seat is offered to her. I have a right to 
keep my seat. I have paid for it. No 
one else in the car offers the woman a 
séat. Evidently public opinion in that car 
would justify me in keeping my seat. 
But I have a right to waive my right to 
my seat and give it to her. Perhaps a 
man holds that he has a right to smoke. 
Certainly, the law allows it and public 
opinion allows it. It is his right to do it. 
No law prevents his smoking on the street 
and blowing the smoke over his shoulder 
into the faces of people behind. This is 
his right. But it is a right he can sur- 
render. So with drinking. Many men 
contend that they have a right to drink. 
It is not a crime and it is not wrong, 
they contend. Well, suppose that this is 
true, they have a right to refrain from 


What Are They? 19 


drinking, too. The right to drink does 
not require that a man exercise it. 

Jesus gave up His rights because, to 
maintain them, He said, would cause peo- 
ple to stumble. It did not seem to Him 
sufficient to say, regarding any course of 
action, “This is only asserting my 
rights.” “My right!” exclaimed Or- 
theris, with deep scorn, in “ His Private 
Honour,” “ My right ! I ain’t a recruity, 
to go whinin’ about my rights * * * 
My rights! ’Strewth A’mighty! I’m a 
man.” Jesus asked also, “ Will my exer- 
cise of my rights injure or inconvenience 
others?” With us it must be so, too. 
“Tt can never be too often repeated in 
this age,” wrote Woolsey, “that duty is 
higher than freedom, that where a man 
has a power or prerogative, the first ques- 
tion for him to ask is: ‘ How and in what 
spirit is it my duty to use my power or 
prerogative? What law shall I lay down 
for myself so that my power shall not be 
a source of evil to me and to others?’ ” 
Now, in using the rights to smoke, to 


20 A Young Man’s Questions 


drink, to go to the theater, and to play 
cards, we must ask whether their use will 
hurt or offend any one. Some would 
deny that these are rights at all. But let 
us grant that men have the right to do 
these things. They are not justified in 
doing them simply because they are their 
rights. “I have a right to eat meat,” 
said Paul, “but if eating meat give of- 
fense to any one or cause any one to 
stumble, I will surrender that right; 
I will eat no meat while the world 
stands.” 

Many men are slaves to their rights. 
They will not surrender them at any 
time. They really do not own their 
rights. Their rights own them. This 
was what Paul said he would not have 
in his life. He would be master of his 
rights. He would not have them his mas- 
ters. “All things are lawful for me; 
but all things are not expedient. All 
things are lawful for me; but I will not 
be brought under the power of any.” 
Men should learn to exercise the liberty 
of surrendering their rights. Dr. Trum- 


What Are They? 21 


bull tells in “ War Memories of an Army 
Chaplain” of a friend who, before the 
Civil War, challenged him to point out 
any single verse in the entire Bible which 
distinctly forbade human slavery. “I re- 
plied,” says Dr. Trumbull, “ that I could 
not point to any verse in the Bible which, 
taken by itself or in view of its context, 
squarely forbade slavery, polygamy, or 
wine drinking; yet, on the other hand, I 
found no single verse commanding any 
one of those practices; therefore, as at 
present advised, as a matter of choice and 
in the exercise of a sound Christian dis- 
cretion, I should have but one wife, no 
‘nigger,’ and drink cold water.”’ If hold- 
ing slaves and drinking liquor were 
rights, at any rate he had a right to fore- 
go exercising them. 

The noblest man is not he who always 
upholds his rights. It is he who knows 
when to waive them for his own good 
and for the good of others. Some men 
refuse to see this. What are their neigh- 
bours to them? Are they their neigh- 
bour’s keepers? That is a very old ex- 


22 A Young Man’s Questions 


cuse, as old as Cain, and as evil and mur- 
derous. 

Jesus was the noblest of men because 
He gave up the greatest rights. He had 
a right, Paul tells us, to be on an equality 
with God. It was not necessary for Him 
to come down here. But he deemed His 
right a thing not to be jealously retained. 
He gave it up, “emptied Himself,” 
“though He was rich, became poor,” 
and in a servant’s form came among men, 
not to be ministered unto but to minister, 
and to give as a ransom for many His 
life, which He had a right to keep. 

There are some rights which we have 
no right ever to surrender—the right to 
be pure and kind and Christlike, the right 
to tell the truth and to hate evil and to 
fight wrong. Among those rights which 
are never to be given up is the right to 
surrender all those rights whose exercise 
would cause others to stumble or hurt 
ourselves. 

Perhaps the reason why more men are 
not able to preserve their liberty at this 
point is to be found in their cowardice. 


What Are They ? 23 


Most men accept the standards of their 
crowd. Does the crowd think this the 
manly thing? Then they do it. Does 
the crowd think this a weak and “goody” 
course? Then they, too, sneer at it. 
What is wanted is men who will think 
for themselves, boldly, who will recognise 
that this is the hard and courageous 
thing, and who will follow the voice of 
God which will tell them their way. And 
this takes pluck. But, as Stevenson asks, 
“ Where did you hear that it was easy to 
be honest? Do you find that in your 
Bible? Easy? It is easy to be an ass 
and follow the multitude like a blind, be- 
sotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am 
well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy 
mean by being honest. But it will not 
bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny 
of conscience.” 

The right ideal of life is a brave and 
full obedience to goodness; to true good- 
ness, not to the conventions of crowds, 
least of all to the low standards of men 
who are afraid to be strong in righteous- 
ness. And that would be a great life in 


24. A Young Man’s Questions 


which God obtained a fearless and perfect 
obedience, and the questions which we 
are to consider in this volume ceased to 
be questions at all, because the life would 
be wholly ruled by His Spirit and law. 
“Tf,” says Stevenson, in his “ Lay Mor- 
als,” from which the two preceding quo- 
tations also have been taken, “ we were 
to conceive a perfect man, it should be 
one who was never torn between conflict- 
ing impulses, but who, on the absolute 
consent of all his parts and faculties, sub- 
mitted in every action of his life to a self- 
dictation as absolute and unreasoned as 
that which bids him love one woman and 
be true to her till death. 

“But we should not conceive him as 
sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appe- 
tites against each other, turning the wing 
of public respectable immorality instead 
of riding it directly down, or advancing 
toward his end through a thousand sinis- 
ter compromises and considerations. The 
one man might be wily, might be adroit, 
might be wise, might be respectable, 


What Are They? 25 


might be gloriously useful; it is the 
other man who would be good. 

“ The soul asks honour and not fame; to 
be upright, not to be successful; to be 
good, not prosperous; to be essentially, 
not outwardly, respectable. Does your 
soul ask profit? Does it ask money? 
Does it ask the approval of the indiffer- 
ent herd? I believe not. For my own 
part, I want but little money, I hope; 
and I do not want to be decent at all, 
but to be good.” 

But in the judgment of the One whose 
judgment alone is of value, goodness is 
the only decency. 


II 


WHY A YOUNG MAN SHOULD BE 
A CHRISTIAN 


THE first question of all questions for 
a young man is, Why should I not be a 
Christian? Even if, as is to be hoped, the 
young man has grown up in a Christian 
home, and always loved Christ, the time 
will come when he must make some de- 
cisive choice or meet some decisive test 
which will mean his open and conscious 
commitment of his life to Christ and His 
service, or his recreancy and faithlessness. 
And in the case of young men who have 
not grown up in the Christian faith, this 
question rises before them as the supreme 
question of their lives. Why should we 
not be Christians? 

Now, first of all, the young man should 
be a Christian because he is one. This 
is a paradox that covers a great truth. 
“Are you a Christian?” a college paper 

26 - 


Should He Be a Christian? 27 


recently represented one student as saying 
to another. ‘“ Of course,” was the reply, 
“do you take me for a heathen?” The 
implication that every man is a Christian 
who is not a heathen is, of course, untrue. 
But, of course, also it is true. ¥ Every 
young man in a Christian land has his 
ideals, standards of judgment, social cus- 
toms, forces at work in his life, which are 
the direct product of the influence of 
Christ. These make his life radically 
different from the lives of men in non- 
Christian lands. In this sense he is a 
Christian. He accepts and enjoys a 
thousand privileges which are due to 
Christ, and which men lack who do not 
live under the influence of Christianity. 
In this sense every young man in our land 
is a Christian, as accepting the secondary 
privileges and blessings of Christianity. 
He is not a Christian in the sense of rec- 
ognising its primary obligations. In other 
words, he takes from Christ all he can get 
without giving anything back. young 
man ought to be a Christian out of a sens 

of fairness. He ought not to be willing 


tt 


\. 


28 A Young Man’s Questions 


to accept the blessings of the Gospel with- 
out recognising and meeting his obliga- 
tions to Christ who brought the Gospel. 

But Christianity is far more than the 
_network of conceptions and influences 
which we call Christian civilisation. Be- 
side this and before this and as the source 
of this it is four things: (1) the forgive- 
ness of sin, (2) the revelation of God in 
Christ, (3) the revelation of man in 
Christ, and (4) the power of God in man 
enabling him to attain the revelation of 
the perfect man in Christ. 

The young man should be a Christian 
because he needs all these and cannot 
find them outside of Christianity. (1) 
As a simple matter of fact, no other re- 
ligion does give the conscious deliverance 
from the sense of guilt of sin. Sao 
old- fashioned _word, and the “sense of 
sin” is not talked about much 1 nowadays; : 
but the man who is of honest heart and 
who is not enslaved by catchwords and 
bloodless assumptions never more current 
than to-day, knows that he has not been 
what he should have been, and that he has 


Should He Bea Christian? 29 


sinned. No naturalistic nonsense telling 
him that his sin is only the innocent ex- 
pression of that honest nature which he 
shares with the animal world deceives 
him. He knows that he is to be judged 
by more than a barnyard moral code, and 
that measured not by the habits of beasts, 
but by the holiness of God he is wrong 
and must be set right. The most solid 
evidence to be found in the world proves 
that Christ can set men right here, and 
that no one else can. (2) But the young 
man of to-day may say, “I do not know 
that there is a God. I have never seen 
Him.” Well, there are several answers 
to that. He never saw Martin Luther. 
He never saw a pain. But he believes in 
Luther, and in pain, and in sound waves 
and molecules, and in a million other 
things which he never saw. “ But these 
I understand,” the young man replies, 
“while God I do not.” But he believes 
in thousands of things he _does not un- 
derstand, and in some of them he be- 
lieves far more profoundly than he does 
in much that is intelligible. It is of no 


30 A Young Man’s Questions 


consequence that we do not know God by 
the same kind of evidence by which we 
know the weight of a dog, or that we do 
not entirely comprehend Him. It is 
enough that we may know God as far as 
we need, and by appropriate evidence. If 
the young man wants to read a book on 
the proofs of God’s existence, let him take 
Flint’s “Theism.” But for most young men 
Christ is the best evidence. We read the 
Gospels, and while we hear Jesus saying, 
“Ye believe in God, believe also in Me,” 
and feel the force of that appeal, some 
are moved even more to say, “ We believe 
in Thee, O Christ. We believe also in 
God.” For Christ is to us the revelation 
of God. Even those men who say that 
they cannot believe that Jesus was di- 
vine, because it is not possible for them 
to conceive thus of God, owe their 
high spiritual conception of God to 
Christ. Only those who have seen God 
in Christ have such a high notion of God 
as this. (3) And Jesus not only shows 
us the Father. He also shows us the 


truth of ourselves. He was what God _ 


Should He Bea Christian? 31 


would have us be. We are satisfied with 
ourselves until we compare ourselves with 
Him, our sin with His purity, our selfish- 
ness with His sacrifice, our meanness with 
His generosity, our pettiness with His 
greatness, our failure with His success. 
Then we see that while Jesus was one of 
us, He was also separate from us. This 
perfectness of character, and of obedience 
to God and of life which we see in Christ 
is God’s standard and ideal for each one 
of us. (4) But the Gospel is more than 
forgiveness and revelation. It is power. 
A Christian is not simply a man who 
knows what he ought to be and do, and is 
sorry he has failed in being and doing 
what he ought. He is a man who has 
entered into a personal and vital rela- 
tionship with God through Christ, who 
recognises that he is a son of God, and 
that God is ready to give him strength 
to act as His son. 

This is the vital thing. To be a Chris- 
tian is to be bound to God through Christ. 
It is as Captain Mahan, the greatest liv- 
ing authority on naval history and strat- 


32 A Young Man’s Questions 


egy, has said, “the direct relation of the 
individual soul to God.” In speaking 
just so, Captain Mahan went on to tell of 
his own conversion, years ago. “I hap- 
pened,” he said, ‘ one week-day in Lent, 
into a church in Boston. The preacher— 
I have never known his name—inter- 
ested me throughout; but one phrase only 
has remained: ‘ Thou shalt call His name 
Jesus, for He shall save His people.’— 
here he lifted up his hands—‘not from 
hell, but from their sins.’ Almost the 
first words of the first Gospel. I had seen 
them for years, but at last I perceived 
them. Scales seemed to fall from my 
eyes, and I began to see Jesus and life as 
T had never seen them before. I was then 
about thirty. Personal religion is but 
the co-operation of man’s will with the 
power of Jesus Christ that man’s soul, 
man’s whole being, may be saved, not for 
his own profit chiefly, but that he may lay 
it, thus redeemed, thus exalted, at the feet 
of Him who loved him and gave Himself 
for him.” Such faith and consecration 
as this is a man’s reasonable service. 


Should He Bea Christian? 33 


But a young man may say, “It is not 
all so clear to me as you assume. I have 
many doubts, intellectual difficulties 
which prevent my accepting this view.” 
Are you sure? Many men speak of in- 
tellectual doubts whose trouble is not that 
they have thought too much, but that they 
have not thought enough. What are 
your doubts? Define them. Write them 
down on paper. If they are real you can 
do this. If you can not do this with 
them, what right have they to obtrude 
themselves into any question of reality? 
But even if you can do this with them, 
are you sure that these are your real dif- 
ficulties? Many men say and, perhaps, 
even believe that their difficulties are in- 
tellectual, when they are moral. If these 
men were right morally, they would be 
ready for faith and Christian knowledge. 
As Fichte says: “ It is only by thorough 
amelioration of the will that a new light 
is thrown on our existence and future 
destiny; without this, let me meditate as 
much as I will, and be endowed with ever 
such rare intellectual gifts, darkness re- 


34 A Young Man’s Questions 


mains within me and around me. * ** * 
I know immediately what is necessary for 
me to know, and this will I joyfully and 
without hesitation or sophistication prac- 
tice.’ And so Carlyle also writes: 
“ Doubt of any kind cannot be removed, 
except by action. On which ground, 
too, let him who gropes painfully in dark- 
ness or uncertain light and prays vehe- 
mently that dawn may ripen into day, lay 
this other precept well to heart—Do the 
duty which lies nearest thee.” This was 
Jesus’ solution: “If any man willeth to 
do His will, he shall know of the doctrine 
whether it is of God.” 

This solution was offered by Jesus in 
connection with His own claims. And 
here is a good point for any man with 
confusion or doubt to take up his prob- 
lem. Was Jesus what He claimed to be, 
and can I depend upon Him? It is far 
wiser for young men to go straight to 
this question than to debate over ques- 
tions of theism and immortality and natu- 
ralistic evolution. Christianity stands or 
falls with Christ, and it urges its claims 


Should He Bea Christian? 35 


upon us because Christ Himself has un- 
answerable claims. The young man 
should read Bushnell’s “ Character of 
Jesus Forbidding His Possible Classifi- 
cation with Men,” Young’s “ Christ of 
History,’ and Simpson’s “The Fact of 
Christ.” But, in a word, it may be said 
that Christ and His influence, in its power 
and quality, can not be accounted for on 
any other ground than that He was what 
He claimed to be. And it is not possible 
to study His life deeply and not perceive 
His uniqueness. As De Wette says: 
“The man. who comes without precon- 
ceived opinions to the life of Jesus, and 
who yields himself up to the impression 
which it makes, will feel no manner of 
doubt that He is the most exalted char- 
acter and purest soul that history pre- 
sents to us. He walked over the earth 
like some nobler being who scarce touched 
it with His feet.” But more than this. 
This Being was more than man. Let any 
one who denies this surpass Him or re- 
produce Him or even approach Him—not 
in genius or exceptional powers, but in 


36 A Young Man’s Questions 


those moral qualities which are within the 
reach of any man’s will. The abysmal 
failure of any such attempt only empha- 
sises the reality and the width of the 
chasm that divides us from Christ. He 
was more than man that man might cease ~ 
to be less. 

But Christ can be examined and studied 
and tested to-day, too. Every day He is 
redeeming drunkards, giving men new 
wills, saving men from their sins, and 
strengthening them to fight victoriously 
against their temptations. The witnesses 
to this truth are innumerable and unim- 
peachable. Why will you not believe 
them? A man troubled with malaria 
tells you he has been cured by quinine. 
A thousand other men corroborate his tes- 
timony. You believe it. Here is testi- 
mony more overwhelming. Jesus Christ 
saves. He can be seen doing it. He will 
save you. 

And every young man needs to be 
saved. He needs to be saved from sin, 
from waste, from folly, from disobedi- 
ence, from shortcoming, from transgres- 


Should He Bea Christian? 37 


sion, from forgetfulness, from selfish- 
ness, from narrowness, from everything 
that flows from sin. We need de- 
liverance from all that makes life 
imperfect. We need deliverance into 
the abundant and perfect life. “I am 
come,” says Jesus, “that ye may have 
life, and have it more abundantly.” The 
abundant life is not to be found in art, in 
music, in business, in philanthropy, in 
science, in politics. There is only one 
place where it is to be found. It is in 
Christ. 

The Christian life is the only complete 
and abiding life. Every man was made 
for it. It is the divinely meant life for 
every man. The young man should be 
a Christian, because only so is he his true 
self. Only so does he come into his 
place of power over life and over death, 
and set himself in the eternal will of his 
Father. Let the young man come to 
Christ now. 

“ The time will come,” says Professor 
Drummond in one of his earlier addresses, 
“when we shall ask ourselves why we 


38 A Young Man’s Questions 


ever crushed this infinite substance of our 
life within these narrow bounds, and cen- 
tered that which lasts for ever on what 
must pass away. In the perspective of 
eternity all lives will seem poor, and 
small, and lost, and self-condemned be- 
side a life for Christ. There will be 
plenty then to gather round the cross. 
But who will do it now? Who will do 
it now? There are plenty of men to die 
for Him, there are plenty to spend eter- 
nity with Christ; but where is the man 
who will live for Christ? Death and 
Eternity in their place. Christ wants 
lives. No fear about death being gain 
if we have lived for Christ. So let it be. 
‘To me to live is Christ.’ There is but 
one alternative—the putting on of Christ; 
Paul’s alternative, the discovery of Christ. 
We have all in some sense, indeed, al- 
ready made the discovery of Christ. We 
may be as near it now as Paul when he 
left Jerusalem. There was no notice 
given that he was to change masters. The 
new Master simply crossed his path one 
day, and the great change was come. 


Should He Bea Christian? 39 


How often has He crossed our path? We 
know what to do the next time; we know 
how our life can be made worthy and 
great—how only; we know how death 
can become gain—how only. Many, in- 
deed, tell us death will be gain. Many 
long for life to be done that they may 
rest, as they say, in the quiet grave. Let 
no cheap sentimentalism deceive us. 
Death can only be gain when to have 
lived was Christ.” 


III 
SHALL I JOIN THE CHURCH ? 


ONE of a young man’s first and most 
important questions is the question of his 
attitude and relation to the Church. In 
any community in which he is likely to 
be, the visible Christian Church is already 
established with its organisations for wor- 
ship and service, and he must of neces- 
sity take up some sort of a position re- 
garding it. Ought every man to connect 
himself with the Church and take part in 
its work? Yes; he ought. But some- 
thing is necessary as a preliminary. The 
Christian Church in any community is the 
body of believing men and women resid- 
ing there. That is not a careful defini- 
tion, but it suffices to emphasise the fact 
that the Church is' a body of people of 
common convictions and affections toward 
Christ. Of course, no one ought to join 


40 


Shall I Join the Church? 41 


it who does not share these convictions 
and affections. But every one who does 
share them should connect himself with it. 

There are many young men, however, 
who dissent from this view. They do be- 
lieve in Christ, they say, and they love 
Him, but they do not see any reason for 
connecting themselves with the Church, 
and they have various grounds of defense 
of their position. Some say that it is 
not necessary, that they can believe in 
Christ and serve Him outside of the 
Church, can go when they want to church 
worship, and co-operate with church 
members; but that the mere form of 
membership is unessential.* Of course, 
men can believe in Christ and love Him 
without being members of His Church, 
just as men could believe in Him and 
love Him as Nicodemus and others of the 
rulers of the Jews did, without openly 
confessing Him when He was on the 
earth. But if this is a valid excuse for 
one man to stay out of the Church, it is 
a valid excuse for all, and there is no 
visible Church any longer, but just a 


42 A Young Man’s Questions 


great host of concealed disciples. It was 
Jesus Himself who instituted the fellow- 
ship of disciples; and the faith in Him 
and love for Him which are not strong 
enough to lead a man to side openly with 
Him and His Church, are not quite of the 
highest type. 

“ But,” say some young men, “ we can 
openly side with Christ without joining 
the Church, and we don’t like to be bound 
as we are when we become formal mem- 
bers.” It is true that every Christian 
man can reveal himself as Christ’s true 
disciple every day, and that a man may 
be even a church member and not do this; 
but the Church in each community ought 
to be the body of all true Christian men 
in that community, and there is no more 
reason why a man should not unite him- 
self to it, than for his declining to recog- 
nise his allegiance to the Government, to 
register for the purpose of voting, or to 
purchase real estate for a house and so 
commit himself as a member of the com- 
munity. Life is full of the assumption of 
obligations. They constitute its glory. 


Shall I Join the Church? 43 


There are young men who complain of 
the Church, and decline to join it because 
of what they regard as its defects. 
“There are so many hypocrites and 
Pharisees in it,’ some say. But the 
young man who pretends not to sympa- 
thise with the real aims of the true 
Church when he does, is a hypocrite as 
truly as the man who pretends to sympa- 
thise when he does not. And there isa 
Pharisaism of indifference and personal 
independence as real as the Pharisaism of 
religious pride and insincerity. It is true 
that there are hypocrites and Pharisees 
both in and out of the Church. No young 
man can escape their company by refus- 
ing to join the Church. Indeed, it may 
be asserted confidently that there is more 
hypocrisy and Pharisaism outside of the 
Church than there is inside. In almost 
every community in the land, the people 
of honour, nobility of character, and gen- 
eral trustworthiness, are in the Church. 
It is usually the desire for a reputation 
for these things which draws-the-dishon- 
est and insincere into the Church, More- 


44 A Young Man’s Questions 


over, the character of others and their un- 
faithfulness are the most pitiable excuses 
to urge in support of our defection of 
duty. If Judas is a traitor, the more 
reason for John’s fidelity. 

Others say that the Church is behind 
the age, but this is not true in any bad 
sense. It is true that the Church is the 
great conservator of the good of the past, 
and that it checks carelessness and haste 
in cutting loose from what is permanent- 
ly valuable and eternally true. But the 
Church is the great progressive force in 
life and in the world. Church councils 
are not the Church, and Luther was as 
truly the Church as the men who con- 
demned him. Whoever has the truth in 
the Church is the true representative of 
the Church. In every community in the 
land it is the age that is behind the 
Church in the attainment of the worthiest 
and noblest things; and the great lead- 
ers in almost every department of soci- 
ety, politics, science, and art, have been or 
are men of the Church. And if it were 
true that the Church is out of the great 


Shall I Join the Church? 46 


current of human life, it would be the 
highest duty of the men who are with-~ 
holding their support from it, to come to. 
its help and deliver it, and rescue thus te 
the world the mightiest force that ever 
has worked in it. 

But some men say that their estimate of 
the Church is so high that they do not 
feel good enough to join, while others 
urge that they are as good without it as 
they would be within it, and are as up- 
right as those who now belong to it. Now 
the Church is the place for both of these 
classes. It is not a collection of perfect 
saints, and no true member of the Church 
feels that he has attained the goal or is 
satisfied with his goodness of character. 
It is a place for men who want the help 
of God and of their fellows, and who, 
feeling their own weakness, know that 
God did not mean men to live their lives 
or hold their faith alone. On the other 
hand, the man who is satisfied with him- 
self needs the ideals of the Church to 
shame him and then entice him. While 
in so far as he is the sort of man he ought 


46 A Young Man’s Questions 


to be, he owes it to Christ to join His 
company, and add to its efficiency for 
righteousness. 

Some men say that the Church is now 
moribund, and that nobody believes in it 
any more, that the preachers.themselves 
do not believe what they preach. The 
men who say this are mistaken. More 
than this, their statement of the Church’s 
duplicity is basely wicked and false. The 
churches have more power to-day in our 
country than ever before, and they never 
believed their message more firmly or in- 
telligently than to-day. There may be 
ministers whose ideals and practices are 
low, far beneath the contempt even of 
many of their church members; but these 
are exceptions. Jesus declared that good 
and evil would be inextricably interwoven. 
until the day of His second coming. But 
in the churches the strongest and best / 
opinion of the land is to be found, the/ 
fullest and fairest acknowledgement of? 
the mysteries and the difficulties of life, \ 
and the most honest and fearless attempt~ 
to meet them. It is the habit of some 


Shall I Join the Church? 47 


young men to allege that honest and fear- 
less search for truth is found outside of 
the Church; but the idea is a mistake. In 
college and in business and everywhere it 
is the Christian men who are doing the 
great part of the real work of the world, 
and who are dealing honestly with their 
own souls and with the problems of life. 


The existence of denominationalism is 


urged by some as a reason for remaining 
outside the organised Church. They want 
to be just followers of Christ without a 
denominational name. But a partisan 
name in politics does not prevent a man 
from being a true patriot. And men are 
willing to join narrow organisations, se- 
cret or semi-secret, which they hold are 
not inconsistent with a broad spirit of 
humanity. The denominations are broader 
and freer than either of these. Almost 
no denomination asks more of its mem- 
bers than that they should believe in 
Christ and wish toserve Him. The Pres- 
byterian Church asks no more than would 
make a man eligible to membership in the 
Congregational or any other evangelical 


48 A Young Man’s Questions 


Church, and the usage of the Congrega- 
tional Church is as broad and as Chris- 
tian. The specter of denominational nar- 
rowness and contention is for the most 
part a pure hallucination. No Christian 
man sacrifices anything or narrows or 
impedes his life by joining any one of 
the evangelical churches, that is, the 
churches that regard the divine Christ 
as the sole Head of His Church, and 
the sole Ruler of His people. 

In our day the numbers of men who 
make membership in lodge or order or 
brotherhood a substitute for membership 
in the Church is very large. There is 
something pathetic in this. The basis of 
these organisations is narrowly mascu- 
line, and often secular or spuriously re- 
ligious, and their method and spirit are 
too often puerile. They are no substi- 
tute for the Church. They have all the 
defects alleged against the Church with- 
out its virtues, and every reason for not 
joining the Church urged by their mem- 
bers is ignored in joining them. Theman 
who does not want-to-commit himself or 


Shall I Join the Church? 49 


to_join any movement where there may 
be hypocrites, dare not join such organi- 
sations and then urge these compunctions 
as against the Church. Moreover, “ when 
men separate from others,” says Sir 
Thomas Browne, “ they unite but loosely 
among themselves.” In other words, no 
tie of secret brotherhood can be as worthy 
or strong as the bond of Christian broth- 
erhood binding the Christian to all his 
brethren throughout the world. Who- 
ever depreciates this tie by presuming to 
set up a stronger, really makes himself 
incapable of the closest bonds. When 
men draw away from the great common 
brotherhood into some narrow order they 
do in reality but bring suspicion upon 
all their notions of union and brother- 
hood. 

Men sometimes say, “ We don’t like the 
preacher,” “ We are too tired on Sun- 
day,” “ We can get more good on Sunday 
from nature or books or outdoor exer- 
cise.” “Sermons in stones” have been 
often urged as an excuse from church 
attendance by people who never stop to 


so A Young Man’s Questions 


read the stones; and outdoor exercise 
is often made a pretext by those who are 
not reduced to the necessity of using the 
hours of the church service for this pur- 
pose, or going without. But these and a 
multitude of similar small excuses are 
brushed away by the two great considera- 
tions which every young man should enter- 
tain. First, every man needs the Church. 
He needs its fellowship, its stimulus, the 
publicity it gives to his Christian faith, the 
opportunities for worship and for serv- 
ice which it offers. And secondly, the 
Church needs every young man. It needs 
him to join in its loving worship of the 
Father and the Saviour, and it needs him 
for the ministry of the Church in the war- 
fare against sin and evil in the world. No 
young man has a right to hold aloof, or 
for the sake of some personal caprice of 
opinion to deny the Church his aid and 
service. 

There are hundreds of men who look 
back with gratitude to the religious train- 
ing of their childhood, and to the influ- 
ences of their early years of attendance at 


) 


Shall I Join the Church? 51 


church, who yet are now holding such an 
attitude toward the Church that their 
children will never have what has been 
the best part of their own training. These 
men will even confess this with a smiling 
but uneasy perplexity. It is a sad phe- 
nomenon, a sort of double treason—un- 
faithfulness both to the past and to the 
future. 

The right course for every young man 
to take is to attend church regularly, to do 
this even though he is not prepared yet to 
join. In time he will believe in Jesus 
Christ and love Him and wish to serve 
Him. Then he should join the Church 
and take at once and always an active and 
untiring part in its work, openly acknowl- 
edging Jesus before men, and rejoicing 
in Jesus’ assurance that in his turn he 
will be acknowledged before God and the 
angels. This is the right and natural 
course. It is the course of reality, of 
manliness, of integrity. The young man 
has no business to play with ways of eva- 
sion and avoidance. Let him take his 
stand with Christ and with the men of 


52 AN Young Man’s Questions 


Christ’s mind and Church, and fight with 
them a man’s fight in the open. 


IV, 


THE YOUNG MAN’S DUTY TO 
SPREAD HIS RELIGION 


Any man who has a religion is bound 
to do one of two things with it—change 
it or spread it. If it is not true, he must 
give it up. If it is true, he must give it 
away. This is not the duty of ministers 
only. Religion is not an affair of a pro- 
fession or of a caste. It is the busi- 
ness of every common man. 

Where did I come from? What am 
I here for? Whither am I going? 
These are questions which confront every 
man. They are no more real to a 
minister than they are to a merchant or a 
marine. Every man must answer them 
for himself. * And the answer that he 
gives them determines his religion. There 
is no proxy religion. Each man has his 
own. If he hasn’t, he has none. No 
other man can have it for him. And if 

53 

’ 


54 A Young Man’s Questions 


he has his own, then he must propagate 
it, if it is true, or repudiate it, if it is 
false. 

The business of preaching the Gospel, 
accordingly, is neither committed to any 
order, nor to be discharged by any lit- 
erature. As an old clergyman of the 
Church of England, who was two gen- 
erations ahead of his day, wrote, “ The 
office of teaching and preaching the Gos- 
pel belongs to men, not to a book, to the 
Church emphatically, though not to the 
clergy only, but to every member of it, 
for a dispensation of the Gospel is com- 
mitted to every Christian, and woe unto 
him if he preach not the Gospel.” 

The command to evangelise the world 
was not given by our Lord to apostles 
only, or to those whom the apostles might, 
centuries later, be claimed to have com- 
missioned for such work. It was given 
to all believers. “ Every disciple was to 
be a disciple,” as Dr. Gordon used to say. 
Whoever heard the good news was to 
pass it on to the next man, and he to the 
next. 


Duty to Spread His Religion 55 


The idea that the world or any one 
land is to be evangelised by one section 
of the Christian body, the other sections 
being exempt from all duty of propaga- 
tion of the faith, is preposterous for many 
reasons, chiefly because a faith that does 
not make every possessor eager to propa- 
gate it, is not worth propagating, and will 
not be received by any people to whom it 
is offered. The religion that would spread 
among men must be offered by man to 
man; and its power, seen in dominating 
the lives of all its adherents and making 
them eager for its dissemination, is es- 
sential as a testimonial of worth. No 
propagation by a profession, essential as 
a distinct teaching and leading-class may 
be, will ever accomplish what can be ac- 
complished by a great mass of common 
men who preach Christ where they stand, 
in home, office, road or shop. 

In a list of Indian missionaries of 
Mohammedanism, published in the jour- 
nal of a religious and philanthropic soci- 
ety of Lahore, says Arnold in “The 
Preaching of Islam,” “ we find the names 


56 A Young Man’s Questions 


of schoolmasters, government clerks in the 
Canal and Opium Departments, traders 
including a dealer in camel carts, an edi- 
tor of a newspaper, a bookbinder, and a 
workman in a printing establishment. 
These men devote the hours of leisure 
left them after the completion of the 
day’s labour, to the preaching of their re- 
ligion in the streets and bazaars of Indian 
cities, seeking to win converts from 
among Christians and Hindus, whose re- 
ligious belief they controvert and attack.” 
This is what constitutes the power of 
Islam. With no missionary organisation, 
with no missionary order, the religion yet 
spread over Western Asia and Northern 


Africa, and retains still its foothold on . 


the soil of Europe. Where the common 
man believes his religion and spreads it, 
other men believe it, too. 

The minister is to be simply colonel of 
the regiment._The real fighting is to be 
done by the men in the ranks who carry 
the guns. No idea could be more non- 
Christian or more irrational than that the 
religious colonel is engaged to do the 


Duty to Spread His Religion 57 


fighting for his men, while they sit at 
ease. And yet, perhaps, there is one idea 
current which is more absurd still. That 
is that there is to be no fighting at all, 
but that the colonel is paid to spend his 
time solacing his regiment, or giving it 
gentle, educative instruction, not destined 
ever to result in any downright manly 
effort on the part of the whole regiment 
to do anything against the enemy. 

Young men are bound to propagate 
their religion by speaking about it, by 
preaching it, in fact. When one meets 
another in a railroad train, and speaks of 
Christ to him, it is as legitimate a type of 
preaching as the delivery of a set dis- 
course by another man from a pulpit in a 
church. Telling men the Gospel, explain- 
ing what Christ can be to a man, is 
preaching, as scriptural as any preaching 
can be made. Ministers ought to make 
this plain, and lay the duty of such 
preaching upon all their laymen and teach 
them how to do it. 

It makes no difference if it is done halt- 
ingly. A broken testimony from a labour- 


58 A Young Man’s Questions 


er to his friend is likely to be more ef- 

fective than a smooth and consecutive 
_ Sunday morning sermon. It would be a 
good thing if all ministers should read 
aloud to their people chapter after chapter 
on Sunday mornings, as preludes to their 
sermons, most of the chapters of Dr. 
Trumbull’s little book on “ Individual 
Work for Individuals,’ and thus set be- 
fore the laymen in their churches the true 
ideal of Christian evangelism, which is 
the propagation of Christianity, not by 
public preachers so much, as by private 
conversation and the testimony of com- 
mon men. 

Of course, if men are to talk about their 
religion they must _know—what it is and 
what it is not. They must study their 
Bibles. It would be a good thing if some 
Sunday evening church services or week- 
day prayer meetings should be turned into 
Bible classes, or informal conferences on 
the Bible and its teachings. A good deal 
of preparatory work would doubtless 
have to be done. It is far easier for a 
minister to prepare a sermon or prayer- 


Duty to Spread His Religion 59 


meeting address, and do all the talking 
himself, than it is to get others ready to 
take part and to work up a good religious 
conference or Bible discussion. But by 
hard work men must be got to study the 
Bible, and if intelligent laymen were to 
take charge of Sunday evening services, 
two or three laymen uniting to conduct 
one service, with a view to direct Bible 
teaching or discussion, there would be 
good results. At any rate, the laymen 
concerned would be compelled to work 
over the Bible a little more. 

And no religious propaganda is likely 
to accomplish much that does not spring 
from and rest upon a family life visibly 
influenced by religion. If men talk about 
Christianity to their fellows and have re- 
ligionless homes, or homes marked by un- 
kindness, harshness, distrust, their talk is 
as sounding brass and clanging cymbals. 
The home is the test of religion. And 
the best fountain and corroboration of 
religious testimony is the Christian home, 
where the family has its altar and prays 
and worships as a family, openly and 


60 A Young Man’s Questions 


unitedly, before the Father after whom it 
is named. 

It is impossible to say whether there is 
now less or more observance of daily 
family prayers than there used to be. It 
is enough to know that there never was 
enough of it, and is not now. Every 
family ought to meet daily as a family in 
confession of its Christian faith, in ac- 
knowledgment of God’s goodness, and in 
prayer for His help and blessing. We 
owe our homes to the influence of Christ. 
Our homes, more even than our churches, 
should be sanctified by constant worship 
hallowed by the spirit of reverent prayer. 
When all our Christian homes are evi- 
dently, even tangibly, filled with the spirit 
of Christ, so that no one, stranger or 
friend, can come into them without feel- 
ing, the repose and peace of them, and 
hearing in them the audible voice of 
prayer and faith, then the Gospel will 
spread as it will never spread from church 
or chapel or by public appeal. 

What we need is a larger return to the 
ways of the primitive Church in this mat- 


Duty to Spread His Religion 61 


ter. We are far ahead of that Church in 
many respects; but we can learn from it 
that the church in the home is as divine 
an institution as the church in the temple, 
and that the best and most effective 
method of evangelisation is the daily 
preaching of the Gospel in house and mar- 
ket and public street by common men, 
whose lives and homes testify to the 
power of the Gospel to ennoble, to en- — 
rich, and to redeem. 

Only such personal work by men as 
has been urged here will work the great 
spiritual change our day needs. 

The word “revival” may not accu- 
rately describe what we want, but what 
we want is clear enough to our own 
minds. We want an awakening of men 
to the deepest and highest, to the eternal 
things in their own lives, to God. And 
if “revival” means “an extraordinary 
awakening of interest in and care for mat- 
ters relating to personal religion,” then a 
“ revival” is precisely what we want all 
over the land. No unreality, no sham 
excitement, no turbid emotionalism, no 


62 A Young Man’s Questions 


ranting, no invertebrate spasm—we do 
not want these; but we do want a quick- 
ening of men’s sense of the unseen and 
abiding, a sharper hatred of evil in itself 
and evil in men’s wills and lives, an up- 
heaval of the deeps that will bring the 
real life of men to the top, and destroy 
the shallow, ungenuine imitations of life 
which bar Christ out of life and life out of 
Christ. We want life brought to its real 
significance and purpose in Christ. And 
we need all the shaking of traditions and 
of silly self-constraints, and all the blast- 
ing of sin, and all the uprising of right 
feeling, which are necessary to the real 
conversion of men. 

What hinders our doing the work nec- 
essary for this? Sin hinders. It hinders 
by killing the desire for the better things, 
by contenting men’s hearts in what is 
squalid by persuading them that it is sat- 
isfying, and in what is hollow by per- 
suading them that it is solid and sub- 
stantial. Sin prevents Christian men from 
wanting to work. It suggests excuses, 
“Not qualified.” “Not time enough,” 


Duty to Spread His Religion 63 


“Time not ripe for it,” “ Example is 
enough.” It makes the work that men 
try to do often of no avail. College men 
and men out of college will not accept 
at par the words of a man whose life 
does not square with his preaching. He 
must be true himself who would teach the 
truth. And sin makes it impossible for 
God to use men. Those who bear the 
vessels of the Lord must be clean. And 
those only are f. for the Master’s use 
who have purged themselves and quit 
with lusts. There are colleges and com- 
munities where there can be no revival 
because there is too much sin. 

Shame hinders. Sometimes it is prop- 
er shame. Men are not fit to speak for 
Christ, and know it. But the remedy 
then is not silence, but an altered life. 
Let the shame that is born of sin and 
that prevents speech die with the death 
of sin. Sometimes it is a dishonourable 
shame. We are ashamed of Jesus. We 
will love Him in our hearts, but we shrink 
from speaking of Him lest men should 
sneer at us, or we should be thought a 


64 A Young Man’s Questions 


little queer. Jesus knew that men would 
feel this way, and He spoke plainly about 
it: “ Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me 
and of My words, of him shall the Son of 
Man be ashamed when He cometh.” Is 
it not a wonderful thing that we should 
be ashamed of Him who is the only One 
in whom was no shameful thing, and all 
of whose experience with us has been 
only evidence not of His but of our 
shamefulness? And is it not wonderful 
that Christians alone should be ashamed 
of their Lord, while Buddhists, Confu- 
cianists, and Mohammedans, are proud 
always openly to avow their devotion? 
We should be proud of our shame of sin 
and ashamed of our shame of Christ. It 
is the want of the one and the pitiable 
presence of the other that hinders many 
men from doing their duty. 

Fear hinders. We are afraid of what 
men will say. Why should we fear? It 
is said that in the stone walls of Mare- 
schal College at Aberdeen are cut the 
words, “ They say. What do they say? 
Let them say.” Jesus knew that men 


Duty to Spread His Religion 65 


would be afraid of men, and He spoke to 
them plainly of this, too: “ Be not afraid 
of them which kill the body and after 
that have no more that they can do. But 
I will warn you whom ye shall fear.” 
The sneer of a man whose sneer is a 
confession of weakness is a slight thing 
compared with the misery of faithlessness, 
or with the grave displeasure of Christ 
who feared nothing, and wants for dis- 
ciples men who will not fear, as Peter did, 
the taunt of a maid or the jibe of a man. 
Where men will not be brave there will 
be no personal work. 

Reticence hinders. There is a reticence 
which is weakness, the inability of a life 
to be itself and do its work. We grow 
Over-conscious, and become the slaves of 
our own thought about ourselves. A man 
is at once actor and spectator, and the 
relationship paralyses the freedom and 
spontaneousness of his life. Or a man 
thinks that religion is not a subject to be 
talked about. “It is too sacred,” he says. 
“ We have no right to interfere with an- 
other man’s religious convictions or to 


° 


66 A Young Man’s Questions 


parade our own.” And why have we not 
a right to deal with one another on the 
highest plane as well as on the lowest, or 
to touch now where we shall touch eter- 
nally? Jesus told His disciples to talk. 
His last command to them forbade silence. 
There will be no revivals where there is 
no manly conversation about Christ. 

Cant and ungenuineness hinder. Hypo- 
crites are of many kinds. Some pretend 
to be Christians, and hurt Christ by mis- 
representing Him. Others are not Chris- 
tians, and hold aloof on grounds that they 
know or ought to know are ungenuine 
and insincere; “Some of those Chris- ~ 
tians are hypocrites.” All use of subter- 
fuge, of temporising and procrastinating 
expedient is cant as truly as unreal relig- 
ious profession. And influence is de- 
stroyed by such things. 

These things hinder. What will help? 
Love will. There will be work for men 
whenever men feel divine love in their 
hearts. The love of Christ will awaken 
men to a love of men. It may be hard to 
love men as they are. We are not asked 


Duty to Spread His Religion 67 


to do that. We are bidden to love the 
finest possibilities in them, and to seek 
them. It was when Paul saw the multi- 
tudes in their possibilities, though uncon- 
scious of them, 


** Bound who should conquer, slaves who should 
be kings, 

Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder, 

Sadly contented with a show of things,” 


that the intolerable craving shivered 
throughout him like a trumpet-call, and 
he longed to perish for their saving and 
die for their life. When we love men 
for what we know Christ can make them, 
we shall go after them for Him. 
Courage will help. Personal work is 
a noble thing because it requires and de- 
velops pluck. The man who will do it 
must bare his soul, and meet each man 
as a man. And the want of such cour- 
age appears at last, when we see straight, 
such a pitiful thing. The loving John 
cannot suppress his feeling of this. He 
speaks of Nicodemus as the man who 
came by night and feared to break with 


68 A Young Man’s Questions 


his associates to confess Christ. And of 
Joseph as having been a disciple “ secret- 
ly for fear of the Jews.” How much 
worthier if they had boldly stood out and 
spoken for the Saviour instead of post- 
poning their confession until He was gone 
and they could only get His body ready 
for its grave! Jesus was a hero. He 
asks as much of us. And revivals will 
come where the heroism of Christ returns. 

Prayer will help. It is prayer that 
enables men 


‘‘To dare to do for Him at any cost.” 


Prayer will dispose men’s hearts to speak 
for Christ. And prayer will secure, by 
virtue of its supernatural influence, power 
not otherwise available to awaken men 
who are asleep, and to shatter the chains 
of sin, of selfishness, of paltriness, of 
pettiness, which hold men away from 
their large inheritance and the liberties - 
of life in God. 

Love and courage and prayer are 
enough to conquer sin and shame and 
fear and reticence and cant, for Christ 


Duty to Spread His Religion 69 


is with them. Therefore, let us awake 
from our sleep and preach the gospel. 
Let us all do it. 


V 
AS TO OBSERVING SUNDAY 


It is a very common thing to hear peo- 
ple both in and out of the Church, min- 
isters as well as others, speaking disap- 
provingly and contemptuously of the 
old-fashioned observance of the Lord’s 
Day. They say it was dreary and enslav- 
ing, galling to children and irksome to 
all, joyless and gloomy and repressive. 
Very probably it was thus with those 
whose religious life was formal and 
lifeless, and who refrained from that 
from which others refrained, but who had 
nothing positive or vital with which to 
fill the day. I do not believe that anyone, 
who grew up in a true Christian home in 
which the old ideas prevailed, can have 
any sympathy with this modern abuse of 
the old-fashioned observance of Sunday. 
To be sure, the games and employments 
of the week were laid aside. The family 

70 


As to Observing Sunday 71 


gathered over the Bible and the cate- 
chism. There was a quiet calm through 
the house. Innumerable little things 
marked the day as distinct. And prob- 
ably it ended with a rare walk with the 
father at the sun-setting, and some sober- 
ing talk over what is abiding and of 
eternal worth. But all this is repugnant 
to the idea of to-day, and one hears a 
great deal about a free and Christian use 
of Sunday, as opposed to the old Puri- 
tanic notion. 

Now the poorest way to win con- 
demnation of the old fashion of Sunday 
observance with many is to call it Puri- 
tanic. They prefer a thousandfold the 
Puritanic temper to the loose, lawless, 
flabby habit of mind and life which this 
day approves. Doubtless the Puritanic 
cast of mind was often hard and stern, 
but it had principle in it. It did things 
because they were right, not because they 
were easy, or it refused to do things not 
because they were hard, but because they 
were wrong. Those who call it somber 
and joyless speak ignorantly. The best 


72 A Young Man’s Questions 


memories of many men to-day go back ta 
fathers who were as iron in their devo- 
tion to right as right, and who led the 
family to church on Sunday mornings, 
and stood at the head of the home as 
some patriarch of old, high priest of his 
household. 

Our day is for laxity and easy-going 
self-indulgence. Going to church regular- 
ly is trying. Quietness is tiresome. Medi- 
tation is altogether too difficult an intel- 
lectual exercise. Weighty and uplifting 
conversation is work. Men admit that 
the old way of spending the day begat 
strength and self-discipline and solidity 
of character, and they are thankful for 
having had homes where these prevailed, 
and they look forward apprehensively to 
the future of their children whose Sun- 
days are destitute of all such influences; 
but nevertheless they have lost the relig- 
ious life and the grip on great realities 
which alone would enable them to do for 
their children what their fathers did for 
them. 

But far more is to be said than merely 


As to Observing Sunday 73 


that the old fashion bred a more worthy 
and solid habit of life. One thing that is 
not to be overlooked is that God com- 
manded the observance of one day in 
seven as peculiarly a sacred day. No 
talk of the sacredness of all days or of 
the supersession of the Old Testament 
law by the gospel should lead us to re- 
gard the law of a Lord’s Day as abro- 
gated. The sacredness of all our wealth 
does not abolish God’s special claim upon 
some specific part of it, and the gospel 
has not superseded the moral law. A 
holy day is as much needed now as ever, 
a day that shall bear witness to our re- 
ligious faith and provide for the irrepres- 
sible needs of our religious nature, that 
cry daily, but that need their own day as 
well as a part of every day. Of course 
the idea of a holy day may be abused. As 
the late Professor Everett, of Harvard, 
said, ‘‘ There are in all such observances 
a right use and a wrong use. The day or 
the place may be sacred in either of two 
senses ; it may be set apart for religious 
and moral opportunities, or it may be 


74, A Young Man’s Questions 


considered sacred in itself ; I may go to 
church feeling that I have now to my 
credit one good deed more, or I may go 
because I recognise another opportunity 
for higher thought and nearer relation 
with God. The test of the observance is 
whether the day or the thing set apart 
casts a shadow on other days and other 
things, or brightens them; whether it 
tends to make the rest of life profane or 
to make all life more sacred. We must 
remember, however, that it is better to 
have one day holy than to have no, day 
at all holy. If one day is holy, the divine 
power has at least so much foothold in 
the world, a beginning from which to 
spread.” 

God wants the worship of the Lord’s 
Day, and he wants us to have the indis- 
pensable blessing and comfort of it. We 
ought to stop one day out of seven from 
our regular work and do some special 
service. We need the day for reading, 
for rest, for fellowship, for human com- 
fort, for those duties for which a special 
day must be set aside or they will never 


As to Observing Sunday 75 


be done; for the study of our Bibles, for 
steadying meditation, for prayer, for for- 
giveness for our misdeeds and shortcom- 
ings and for preparation of heart for bet- 
ter living. Six days of work, however 
we may strive to keep ourselves above 
our work, drag us down right effectually 
into it, and when Saturday evening 
comes the young man is in want of a 
spiritual retoning. The Lord’s Day breaks 
over the world with its quietness, and 
rightly used, it is as the pool by the 
Sheep’s Gate after the angel’s troubling. 
We go down into the waters and come out 
whole. 

But all this depends, of course, upon 
our use of the day. There are some 
things that are deadly in their power to 
spoil it. One is the Sunday newspaper. 
I pass by all that may be denounced 
as immoral and defiling in it. There is 
harm enough in its simple secularity, in 
its want of moral uplift. The facts are 
more powerful than any denunciation. 
Look at the men who feed their minds 
and souls on Sunday with this food. They 


76 A Young Man’s Questions 


miss the calm, the holy peace, the inflow- 
ing divinity of the day. A second thing 
that will spoil the day is sport. It is not 
the day for it. Golf, bicycling, driving— 
any sport simply kills the religious use of 
the day. A quiet walk with a friend, or 
a book, with the heart on Christ, and the 
thoughts upon what is noble and en- 
during is as helpful to-day as when 
Cleopas and his friend walked with the 
unknown Saviour to Emmaus, with 
glowing souls. 

As to church attendance, doubtless 
many excuses can be found if men go to 
hear other men talk, or to be entertained, 
or amused. It casts suspicion on a man’s 
sincerity, however, if he stays away from 
church on the ground that it is not re- 
ligiously helpful to him, and spends his 
morning with the newspaper or on the 
golf links or in bed after a night out. 
And the end of church attendance is not 
to hear a sermon. It is worship, and the 
opportunity for reverent thought and 
prayer with fellow-worshippers. Those 
men forget this, who sneer at the quality 


As to Observing Sunday 77 


/ 


of the sermons preached, or perhaps it 
has been so long since they have heard 
a sermon that they really forget what it 
is like. The wisest man can learn some- 
thing from the poorest preacher, and can 
pray in the dullest church ; and the ex- 
perience of strong men and strong races 
-has testified in all ages to the power of 
worship in the church to help character 
and to feed reverence. Furthermore 
there is a great deal of foolish talk about 
poor preaching. It is better than the 
newspapers, more thoughtful, more ear- 
nest. A country preacher’s sermon is su- 
perior to the country editor’s writing or 
to the country lawyer’s speeches as a rule, 
and the city preacher’s sermon can be as 
favourably contrasted with the editorials 
in the city newspapers. Even in poor 
sermons there is good. “I don’t see how 
you can stand it, to sit and listen to such 
preaching, professor,” was said once to 
a great teacher who was also a great 
preacher in his own denomination, 
Ransom Dunn, who was laid aside on ac- 
count of ill health and obliged to listen 


78 A Young Man’s Questions 


to inferior men. “They all say some 
good things,” he replied, “and the text 
is all right and I can think of other. 
things on the subject.” The truth is 
always the truth and no man can wholly 
obscure it. We can have no excuse if 
we do not get good from every attempt, 
however poor, to set the truth forth. It 
is our fault as much as the preacher’s if 
we fail. But apart from all this, 
surely God is to be publicly honoured 
and acknowledged of men, and no 
brilliancy or stupidity of preachers can 
justify us in neglecting openly to thank 
God for his preservation and goodness 
and all the blessings of this life. 

The practical questions regarding the 
observance of the Lord’s Day settle them- 
selves easily for us when we have begun 
to look at the day in this spirit. We will 
read good books, poetry and prose, the 
biographies of true men and the thoughts 
of prophets. We will not allow ourselves 
to study on Sunday if we are students, 
and we will ep the dav as free as possi- 


As to Observing Sunday 79 


ble from all secular duty. “ There 
is no doubt in my mind,” writes a stu- 
dent in a western university, “as to 
whether I ought to study on Sunday, or 
not ; I do not believe in it. When I get 
through studying Saturday night, I know 
that I’ll not see the inside of those books 
until Monday morning. Although I like 
my work, it is a relief to know that that 
principle is a law tome. Even if for no 
religious principle, I think that a fellow 
ought to have that let up in his work.” 
We will do no unnecessary work and will 
spare others. We will not ride on rail- 
road trains if we can avoid it. We cer- 
tainly will not do it onlong journeys, and 
where railroads are only a form of local 
transportation, like street cars, we will 
reduce our use of them to a minimum. 
There was something both pathetic and 
admirable in the sight of venerable John 
G. Paton refusing to use even street cars 
on Sunday in his visit to America, and 
keeping his appointments by long walks, 
sometimes having even to run between 


80 A Young Man’s Questions 


engagements. It is far better to have 
even such rigid principles than to be lax 
and dissolute. 

This view of the Lord’s Day is as far 
as possible removed from a hard legal 
observance of it. That observance is bet- 
ter than none; but this is better than that. 
This conceives Sunday as a physical and 
spiritual necessity, a “day of rest and 
gladness,” when the life rebathes itself 
in the atmosphere of God. To say that 
all our days should be spent thus sounds 
well, but it is for the most part simply 
an excuse for spending none of them so. 
Just as set times in each day are neces- 
sary for Bible study and prayer, so a set 
day in each week is necessary for the 
emancipation of the soul from care, for a 
renewing of the springs of life within, for 
cleansing and quieting of thoughts and 
new empowering. 

We are not called upon to judge others 
in this. Each man stands or falls to his 
own Master. And others have no busi- 
ness judging us. Our contention is sim- 
ply that the Sabbath was established for 


‘As to Observing Sunday 81 


tan, that he needs it, and that its best use 
is a religious use; that the man who sec- 
ularises the day is secularising hls life, 
and losing one of its finest supports and 
noblest blessings. Sunday golf, news- 
papers, and all that sort of thing, are bad 
and weakening in their influence, and they 
are pathetic evidence of the trend and 
taste of the man who thus abandons his 
birthright, and forgets what it is to be a 
son of the God who worked and rested, 
but did both as God, and who expects 
His sons to be like Him. 


VI 
HIS COMPANIONS. 


SITTING in the saloon of a little British 
steamer off the China coast one evening, 
some years ago, after the other officers 
and passengers had left the dinner table, 
the chief officer lighted his pipe and, 
pouring out some whisky and soda, 
pushed the whisky bottle over to me, and 
asked me to join him. When I thanked 
him and declined, he looked up in a 
frank and cordial way and _ said: 
“You'll not mind my saying, will you, 
that I never do really feel quite at home 
with men who will not drink with me? 
A glass together is a good social tie. 
Now you and I would feel a good deal 
chummier if you just did as I do in this 
matter.” I laughed and told him that it 
really wasn’t necessary, that we could 
talk together and be good friends, even 
if I didn’t share his “peg.” I thought 

82 


His Companions 83 


to myself that if one of us needed to 
make a sacrifice in the matter, it would 
better be he. 

Now my friendly chief officer’s view is 
a very common one. Young men are 
prone to think that without a vice or two 
there cannot be any good comradeship; 
so they take to an indulgence for which 
at the outset, perhaps, they do not care 
at all, or care only in the way of dislike, 
and imagine that this provides them with 
a solid basis for true friendship and good 
fellowship; which is a very piteous mis- 
take. The friendship which is fed on 
such a root has frail and precarious nour- 
ishment. A common taste for drink or a 
particular sort of gambling, or any com- 
mon “fast” pursuit is as likely to lead 
to petty dispute as to high and enduring 
companionship. The grapes of a pure 
friendship never yet grew on such a 
bramble. 

How contemptible this view of friend- 
ship is when you stop to think about it ! 
Friendship is not now a great, unselfish 
will to serve and love. It is community 


Na aes, 


84 A Young Man’s Questions 


of participation in what is unclean and 
sinful, or at the best frivolous and trivial, 
a sort of fellowship in dissipation. Now, 
real friendship is an inter-knitting of life 
in its deepest and best things, not a super- 
ficial and meaningless contact over some 
common physical taste or indulgence. 
Young men cannot keep from compan- 
ionship. They ought not to desire to do 
so. God intended us for fellowship and 
enriched us with the necessity of love. 


‘« T believe who hath not loved 
Hath half the sweetness of his life unproved: 
Like one who, with the grape within his 


grasp, 

Drops it with all its crimson juice unpressed, 
And all its luscious sweetness left unguessed, 
Out from his careless and unheeding clasp.” 


Every young man should have com- 
panions and cultivate them. These are 
the years for him to grow rich in friend- 
ships. Some will surely come to him 
late; but most of those which bless his 
older years will be the friendships of his 
youth grown nobler with time. 

All of a young man’s life should be 


His Companions 85 


courteous and kindly, open thus to the 
approach of other hearts, and encoura- 
ging friendliness in all who come near. 
This is not a counsel of looseness. There 
is a just reticence and reserve of nature 
which is the best protection of the sanc- 
tities of human intercourse. But a con- 
sistent cordiality in a strong, clean-living 
man is a far better thing than occasional 
bursts of maudlin affection, over wine or 
games, in a man at other times taciturn 
and of self-centered heart. 

It may sometimes be unjust, but it is 
unavoidable, to judge young men by the 
companions they choose. “ Tell me thy 
companions,” says Cervantes, “and I will 
tell thee what thou art.” “ We should 
ever have it fixed in our memories,” says 
an old writer, “that by the character of 
those whom we choose for our friends, 
our own is likely to be formed, and will 
actually be judged of by the world.” 
Wise business men watch the company 
their trusted employees keep. And it 
happens more than once that new checks 
are devised for protection against the 


86 A Young Man’s Questions 


losses which are threatened by the loose- 
ness of a man in the choice of his friends. 
It is the man of clean life and of stainless 
associations whom men trust. 

Young men should not be afraid to 
break away from companionships which 
they discover are evil and injurious. A 
man does not like to do this. It seems a 
little Pharisaical; as though he said, “I 
am too good to associate longer with 
you.” But it is hypocrisy to stay with a 
crowd whose standards and practices you 
abhor, and the only right thing for a 
man to do, who discovers that temptations 
are inevitable if he keeps up certain com- 
panionships, which could be avoided if 
he would sever these companionships, 
and that he has-not influence enough to 
hold his fellows in check and draw them 
up, is to break with them and be free. 
Perhaps he will be able to carry some 
with him. In many country towns young 
men: get off the road, and in the dearth 
of fine interests and high influences play 
with loose habits and wrong things. But 
there is a large remnant of good in them. 


His Companions 87 


They have simply slid down because it 
was the easiest way to go, not because 
they especially care for it. Let one man 
rise up and stand firm, yielding nothing, 
but keeping a merry heart of good fellow- 
ship in him with all his clean and fearless 
purity, and others, weaker, but no fonder 
of foul things, will creep up to him and 
lean on his strength. All that is needed 
is that one man should be strong, and 
break from his sheep impulse to follow 
the flock. Life has room and need for 
such heroism. It is not intended to be 
a soft compliance with everything. It is 
meant to be full of sharp and stern re- 
sistance, of fierce rupture with evil, and 
of the courage to stand alone. 

There is no need of haste is choosing 
companionships. Take your time and be 
sure. “ There is a certain magic or charm 
in company,” said Sir Matthew Hale, 
once Lord Chief Justice of England, “ for 
it will assimilate and make you like to 
them by much conversation with them; 
if they be good company, it is a great 
means to make you good, or confirm you 


88 A Young Man’s Questions 


in goodness; but if they be bad, it is 
twenty to one but they will infect and 
corrupt you. Therefore be wary and shy 
in choosing and entertaining, or frequent- 
ing any company or companions; be not 
too hasty in connecting yourself to them; 
stand off awhile until you have inquired 
of some (that you know by experience to 
be faithful) what they are; observe what 
company they keep; be not too easy to 
gain acquaintance, but stand off, and 
keep a distance yet awhile, till you have 
observed and learnt touching them. 
Men and women that are greedy of 
acquaintance, or hasty in it, are often- 
times snared in ill company before they 
are aware, and entangled so that they 
cannot easily loose from it after, when 
they would.” This was a wise man speak- 
ing wisdom. Of course, life is to be a free 
and spontaneous thing, not a stilted self- 
ishness; but the best we have to give is 
ourselves. Let us not make a present of 
our highest possession to every chance 
comer, and discover too late that we have 
laid ourselves bare to shame. 


His Companions 89 


Sir Matthew speaks of the magic as- 
similating power of our companionships. 
We cannot resist this if we would. It 
works on us so secretly that we are not 
aware of its power. We lose some of our 
fineness of nature with coarse friends 
without knowing that something is gone 
which will not come back again. And the 
noble influence of good men fashions us 
and touches our lives with dignity and 
strength, so that the eyes of others look 
on us with wonder before we know that a 
change has come. “ Every man,” says 
Euripides, in “ Phoenix,” “is like the 
company he is wont to keep.” 

A young man should have a few older 
men, and at least a few younger men also, 
among those who call him friend, and 
whom he regards as companions of an 
inner degree. He needs the steadying 
of larger experience, and he needs, too, 
the sobering, enriching influence of 
friendships where he is the trusted and 
respected one and the source of strength. 

In the life of Dr. John Hall, there is 
printed a fac-simile of a list of eleven 


eee: 


go A Young Man’s Questions 


names in Dr. Hall’s handwriting, on the 
margin of which he has written, “ My 
friends.” His son and biographer says 
that his father had banded himself with 
these friends in the college at Belfast, “to 
pray, to improve their own spiritual life, 
and to promote a new missionary spirit. 
When separating for their life-work, 
these friends resolved that on Saturday 
evenings they should remember each 
other in prayer and by name as long as 
they lived.” This fellowship, adds the 
son, “was very dear to them all, and 
formed an abiding influence upon my 
father’s life.” 

This is the right tone for our compan- 
ionships, the note of grave and reverent 
affection. Under it a young man’s life 
will be high-toned and true. The lines of 
true character will be cut deep and inef- 
faceable. Back of the playfulness which 
is wholesome and right, will lie the still 
and serious realisation of what friend 
owes to friend, and we shall live, in truth 
and goodness, because we live with good 
and true men and not alone. 


VII 
SHALL I DRINK? 


PRACTICALLY every young man is 
solicited at some time to drink wine or 
beer, or some stronger drink. What shall 
his attitude be on this question? Ought 
he to be a teetotaler, or should he take 
what he will be told is a moderate view, 
and drink a little for the sake of socia- 
bility and good fellowship? If the ques- 
tion is put in the extreme form. “ Shall 
I become a drunkard, or be a temperate 
man, even to the extent of abstinence?” 
every young man will choose abstinence. 
But many hold that a middle course is 
much more manly, that to decline to drink 
for fear of becoming a drunkard or los- 
ing control of one’s appetite is an evi- 
dence of weakness or cowardice. Some 
men allege that to refrain from touching 
drink because its abuse is evil, is no more 
necessary or admirable than to refrain_ 

g! 


g2 A Young Man’s Questions 


from using language because it is often 
put to evil service, or fire because it is 
dangerous, or any food which can be 
overused with harmful effect. 

One principle may be set forth clearly 
at the outset,—namely, that it is within 
any man’s right to refrain from the use 
of all intoxicating drink. It is no man’s 
duty to use it as a beverage. Every man 
is within his Christian liberty in refusing 
to touch it. If any man moves in a so- 
ciety that curtails this liberty or denies it, 
his suspicion ought to be aroused, for the 
next step will be the abridgment of other 
liberties as well. 

But I am going further than this. It is 
not only a man’s right to let liquor alone, 
itis his duty. /He owes it to society and 
to himself as a worker. He cannot do his 
best work except as a sober, clear- 
minded, steady-nerved man. The rail- 
roads will not employ men who are not 
sober, and are coming more and more to 
prefer total abstainers. Even bartenders 
are often required to let drink alone. 
The idea that it brightens the intellect 


Shall I Drink? 93 


and sharpens the faculties is purely falla- 
cious. This defense comes, as a rule, 
from men upon whom the habit has fas- 
tened itself, and who seek a justification 
of it, and who obviously disprove their 
own contention. “I have never used 
liquor,’ Mr. John G. Johnson, the lead- 
ing lawyer of Philadelphia, was recently 
reported to have said, “because I don’t 
like it. But I know men who have used 
it, and I don’t think it ever brightened 
their intellects.” 

Not only does drinking not brighten 
the intellect and increase its working 
power, but it breaks down the integrity 
of nature and the vitality of the men who 
drink. “ Alcohol is injurious,’ Dr. J. 
Solis-Cohen, of Philadelphia, is reported 
by the same paper which quoted Mr. 
Johnson’s statement to have said: “A 
man may drink it to deaden his sorrow, 
but the pendulum will always swing as 
far one way as it does the other. If he 
finds happiness or joy in intoxication, 
he will pay for it by consequential misery 
when he gets sober. It might stimulate 


94 A Young Man’s Questions 


the minds of some men temporarily, but 
it would soon kill their intellects and 
shorten their lives. Physicians agree 
that it is a bad thing. All stimu- 
lants are injurious. A few years ago we 
stopped the use of liquor in the Home 
for Consumptives. Since that time there 
has been a marked decrease in the number 
of hemorrhages. It is bad in every 
way.” 

Of course the young man who begins 
to drink does not intend to drink enough 
to be injured by it. He believes he can 
control himself, and he despises the 
drunkard who has surrendered his man- 
hood and his self-control as thoroughly 
as any abstainer does. But what evidence 
has any young man that he can retain 
control of this appetite? Let any young 
man who thinks he can, look up the 
family history of the people whom he 
knows best, his own family history, even. 
In few cases will he be able to recall two 
generations without meeting a drunkard, 
who meant to be only a moderate drinker 
when he began. No drunkard meant to 


Shall I Drink? 95 


be a drunkard when he began. He did 
not intend to acquire the habit of drink. 
But a habit fixes itself upon the man who 
does the acts in which the roots of the 
habit reside. Even if the habit is but one 
of moderate drinking, that is the only 
road to the habit of immoderate drinking. 
And it is a road that is surer to run that 
way than the other. 

“ Twenty-five years ago,” Mr. Depew 
said, recently, in an address to railroad 
men, “I knew every man, woman and 
child in Peekskill. It has been a study 
with me to mark the course of the boys, 
in every grade of life, who started with 
myself—to see what has become of them. 
Last fall I was up there, and began to 
count them over, and the lesson was most 
instructive. Some of them became clerks, 
some merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, 
or doctors. It is remarkable that every 
one of them that had drinking habits is 
now dead—not a single one of my age 
now living. Except a few who were 
taken off by sickness, everyone has 
proved a wreck, and has wrecked his 


g6 A Young Man’s Questions 


family, and did it from rum and whiskey 
and no other cause. Of those who were 
church-going people, who were steady, 
industrious and hard-working men, and 
frugal and thrifty, every one without ex- 
ception, owns the house in which he lives, 
and has something laid by, the interest on 
which, with his house, would carry him 
through many a rainy day. When a man 
becomes debased with gambling, rum, or 
drink, he seems to care for nothing; all 
his finer feelings are stifled, and ruin only 
is his end.” ? 
Even men who themselves drink will 
give this sort of advice to others; and 
when they have to employ others, will 
prefer, without hesitation, the man who 
is known to abstain. Such a man is 
more trusted because he can trust himself. 
He has acquired the habit of self-control, 
and no temptation can allure him. « 
Many young men drink because it 
seems to them to be a brave thing to do. 
They feel a manly independence in it. 
As a matter of fact, it is not courage, but 
cowardice, that leads many of them to it. 


Shall I Drink? 97 


Some one invites them to take a drink, 
and they are afraid to refuse, or there is 
a crowd about them, and they do not want 
to seem timid. They think that to retain 
the respect of the crowd they must do as 
the crowd is doing. But probably the 
whole crowd is just following one or two 
leaders, and the real heart of the leaders 
may be only a coward’s heart. These 
are the very times when principles are 
worth something, and when the man who 
says, “I will not,” stands out as the man 
of true courage. 

The habit of drink, whether regular or 
not, is a wasteful habit. The American 
Grocer estimated the expenditure of the 
people of the United States for sib 2 
in the year 1900 as follows: 


Alcoholic drinks .............- $1,059,563,787 
POE tse ces ceevc aca caleldiaests 125,798,530 
Tea Re guicisuma/de son wralein 37,312, 
Cocoa. Pomduceaaencesduvcee ,0Q0,000 
$1,228,674,925 


The men and women who spent this 
billion and fifty million dollars for strong 


98 A Young Man’s Questions 


drink have nothing left to show for the 
expenditure but some weakness hidden 
away somewhere as the sole consequence. 
The beer habit, which is the easiest habit 
for young men to form, is as bad as any 
in this. It can be indulged anywhere, 
and its innocence is imaginary. “I 
think beer kills quicker than any other 
liquor,”’ say an old physician. “ My at- 
tention was first called to its insidious 
effects, when I began examining for life 
insurance. I passed as unusually good 
risks five Germans, young business men, 
who seemed in the best health, and to 
have superb constitutions. In a few 
years I was amazed to see the whole five 
drop off, one after another, with what 
ought to have been mild and easily cur- 
able diseases. On comparing my experi- 
ence with that of other physicians, I 
found they were all having similar luck 
with confirmed beer-drinkers, and my 
practice has since heaped confirmation on 
confirmation.” 

| At a recent meeting of the New York 
‘Academy of Medicine, the question of the 


a 


Shall’ I Drink? 99 


effects of alcoholism was discussed, and 
Dr. Charles L. Dana spoke of having 
studied carefully three hundred and fifty 
cases of alcoholism at Bellevue Hospital, 
of which the most frequent form was 
dipsomania and the next pseudo-dipso- 
mania. Over two-thirds of the whole 
had begun drinking before the age of 
twenty years, and all before thirty years. 
As a rule, the drunkard did not live more 
than fifteen years after his habit had be- 
come confirmed. Whether beer or spirits, 
the effects of their use are bad. Why 
should a man begin a wasteful habit 
which ‘is so easily carried to excess, which 
even if not carried to excess does him no 
good, and does do him positive harm? 
It is true that in some associations it 
is hard for a young man to refrain from 
drinking. Many young men grow up in 
homes where wine is always on the table. 
They are in business relations where it is 
regarded as the natural thing to drink 
and peculiar to abstain. But conscien- 
tious principles are respected everywhere, 
when they are pleasantly but firmly ad- 


100 A Young Man’s Questions 


hered to; and even if the principles are 
not conscientious, but merely prudential, 
they will be offensive to no one to whom 
they are not made offensive by some per- 
sonal unpleasantries on the part of the 
one holding them. 

The principle of abstinence should be 
with us a conscientious, not merely a pru- 
dential, principle. Our moral judgment 
should so revolt from the terrible abuse 
of liquor and the liquor business, that we 
will refrain from the use of drink as the 
only effective protest. The terrible risk 
of one act issuing in a second act, and 
that in a third, and that in the birth of a 
habit with all the possible consequences, 
should make us fear for ourselves, while 
what we see of wreck and ruin round us 
should lead us to abstain for our brother’s 
sake. This is the high, religious ground. 
Drinking keeps us back from the best in 
ourselves, and it hinders us from the best 
helpfulness toward others. It is religious 
principle alone that will really stand all 
the tests in this matter, as religious prin- 
ciple alone can effect what needs to be 
effected when men have gone too far. At 


Shall I Drink? 101 


the meeting of the New York Academy 
of Medicine referred to, Dr. Allen Starr 
confessed “ that the only reformed drunk- 
ards of whom he had knowledge, were 
those who had been saved, not through 
medical, but through religious, influ- 
ence.” He declared his belief that peri- 
odical drinking was chiefly a matter of 
moral obliquity. 

The great word for the young man is 
“liberty.” He wants to be free. Often- 
times he begins to drink with the idea that 
this is a sign of his independence. But 
this is the use of liberty for the purpose 
of enslavement. He only is free who is 
master of his tastes and appetites, and 
can look the temptation to drink calmly 
in the face, and say, without wavering, 
“No.” The man who says: “ That is no 
liberty. That is slavery to hard asceti- 
cism, and is cowardly. Iam free because 
I can say ‘ Yes’ or ‘No’ as I please,” 
may be telling the truth about himself 
once in many times, but for the rest, he 
thinks he can say “ No” when he wants 
to do so, because he never wants to do so. 


VIII 
SHALL I SMOKE? 


THOUSANDS of good men _ smoke. 
Either through association or from other 
reasons, the idea of sociability and good 
fellowship has become identified with the 
smoking habit, and many times the man 
who does not use tobacco will be some- 
what lonesome in his habit of abstinence 
in the midst of smokers on every side. 
The fact that smoking becomes such a 
fixed and unconquerable taste with many 
good men is a proof that there is a pleas- 
ure in it which cannot be summarily con- 
demned. Yet, from the point of view of 
unselfishness and of perfect cleanliness 
and freedom, it is a habit for which young 
men can find no adequate defense, and 
there are things to be said about it which 
make it hard to see how any young man 
can acquire and retain the habit save as a 

1032 


Shall I Smoke? 103 


confessed indulgence or concession to 
weakness. 

For, first of all, the tobacco habit is ar 
unclean habit. It is impossible for a man 
to use tobacco without being sometimes at 
least contaminated by its odour. After a 
little, of course, his senses become hard- 
ened, so that he does not notice this; but 
all who do not use tobacco do notice it, 
and it is especially distasteful to women. 
Most women, of course, make no com- 
plaint, and often even encourage men to 
smoke, either because they do not want 
to limit their pleasure, or because they 
think that a man’s influence is dependent 
upon the maintenance of good fellowship 
in this way. But, on the other hand, they 
do not like the smell of tobacco, and thou- 
sands simply cannot abide it. The odour 
of it in homes or railroad cars or public 
places is almost unbearable to many of 
them. Few smokers realise the discom- 
fort they cause others. They will smoke 
in a smoking compartment of a sleeping 
or parlour car, and with doors opened pol- 
lute the atmosphere of the whole car, or 


104 A Young Man’s Questions 


will smoke in public places and let the 
smoke drift into the faces of others to 
whom it is unpleasant or even nauseat- 
ing. 

Men reply to this that no gentleman 
would do this. But that is not true. 
Some will not do it, but other gentlemen 
do it constantly—at any rate, men who 
always pass for gentlemen, and are gen- 
tlemen in other respects. But they are 
simply so addicted to their habit that 
they lose the consciousness of its repul- — 
siveness to others. The tobacco habit is 
a distinctly coarsening habit. It dulls 
the senses of taste and smell, and often 
of hearing, and it blunts the sensibilities 
of many men. 

The New York Sun recently reported 
an incident on a trolley car which keenly 
illustrates this : 

“ Both platforms were crowded as well 
as the interior of the car, and this fellow 
stood at the rear door and smoked cheap 
cigarettes incessantly. The smoke blew 
in upon the men and women who were 
packed together on the seats, and in the 


Shall I Smoke? 105 


aisles, and their complaints to the con- 
ductor resulted in nothing. 

“ The conductor remonstrated with the 
man, as did a trained nurse who was re- 
turning home after a night’s vigil in a 
patient’s room, and who was made ill by 
the smell of the poor tobacco. All was 
in vain; the man defied the passengers 
and the conductor and dared the latter to 
put him off the car. 

“He was standing on the rear plat- 
form, and the law allowed him to smoke 
there, he contended. And, as there were 
more women than men on the platform, 
he smoked several cigarettes in their 
faces, seemingly to his own satisfaction. 

“The most surprising part of the per- 
formance was that the man was well clad 
and but for his conduct might have been 
taken for an ordinary person of respecta- 
bility.” 

Many who smoke would join in con- 
demning a boor like this, but let them 
pause and ask whether they have never 
themselves offended, if not in this coarse 
way, yet as really. Have they never 


106 A Young Man’s Questions 


tainted the atmosphere with the tobacco- 
filled odour of their clothes or persons, or 
never smoked offensively on a steamer 
deck or in a home, or come from an at- 
mosphere of smoke into the presence of 
people to whom the odour of tobacco was 
altogether objectionable? There are 
some dinners to which men who can’t 
smoke, or who will not, go under constant 
silent protest, because they know they 
will come home with their clothes reeking 
with the odour and their lungs defiled 
by it. 

This is not too strong language. The 
nicotine poison is a defiling poison. That 
it is so in cigarettes is universally ad- 
mitted. Many of the American states 
have passed laws forbidding the use of 
cigarettes by boys. The Japanese gov- 
ernment has forbidden the use of tobacco 
by all young men under twenty years of 
age. The reasons for this are not all 
moral or social. There are adequate 
physical grounds for it. The New York 
Medical Journal says: 

“ Cigarettes are responsible for a great 


Shall I Smoke? 107 


amount of mischief, not because the 
smoke from the paper has any particu- 
larly evil effect, but because smokers— 
and they are very often boys or very 
young men—are apt to use them continu- 
ously or at very frequent intervals, believ- 
ing their power for evil is insignificant. 
Thus the nerves are under the constant 
influence of the drug, and much injury 
to the system results. Moreover, the 
cigarette smoker uses a very considerable 
amount of tobacco during the course of a 
day. Nicotine is one of the most power- 
ful of the known ‘nerve poisons.’ Its 
depressing action upon the heart is by far 
the most noticeable and noteworthy symp- 
tom of nicotine poisoning. 

“The frequent existence of what is 
known as ‘smoker’s heart’ in men 
whose health is in no other respect dis- 
turbed is due to this effect. Those who 
can use tobacco without immediate injury 
will have all the pleasant effects reversed, 
and will suffer from symptoms of poison- 
ing if they exceed the limits of tolerance. 
These symptoms are: 


108 A Young Man’s Questions 


if 


1. The heart’s action becomes more 
rapid when tobacco is used. 

“2, Palpitation, pain, or unusual sen- 
sations, in the heart. 

“3. There is no appetite in the morn- 
ing, the tongue is coated, delicate flavours 
are not appreciated, and acid dyspepsia 
occurs after eating. 

“4. Diseases of the mouth and throat 
and nasal catarrh appear, and become 
very troublesome. 

“5. The eyesight becomes poor, but 
improves when the habit is abandoned. 

“6. <A desire, often a craving, for 
liquor or some other stimulant is ex- 
perienced.” 

Professor Latlin supports this view, 
including the emphatic statement about 
the relation of the use of nicotine to the 
alcoholic taste: 

“Tobacco in any form is bad, but in a 
cigarette there are five poisons. There is 
the oil in the paper, the oil of nicotine, 
saltpeter to preserve the tobacco, opium 
to make it mild, and the oil in the flavour- 


ing. 


Shall I Smoke? 100 


“ The trouble with the cigarette is the 
inhaling of the smoke. If you blow 2 
mouthful of smoke through a handker- 
chief, it will leave a brown stain. Inhale 
the smoke and blow it through the nos: 
trils and no stain will appear. The oi! 
and poison remain in the head and body. 
Cigarettes create a thirst for strong 
drink.” 

Mr. Hadley, of the Jerry McAuley 
Mission, in New York, testifies that the 
drunkards who are converted in the mis- 
sion break off the tobacco habit, too, and 
that the return to nicotine usually means 
the return to alcohol. 

But there are thousands of smokers in 
whom the smoking habit has nothing to 
do with the drinking habit, and the young 
man is not likely to be deterred from the 
use of tobacco by warnings which he is 
sure are exaggerated. Even so, how- 
ever, he is certain to pay some penalty. 
No inveterate smoker can be quite as 
steady of nerve and solid of constitution 
as he would be without tobacco. Gen- 
eral Grant died confessedly of cancer 


110 A Young Man’s Questions 


brought on by excessive use of tobacco. 
A professor at Annapolis declared that 
“he could indicate the boy who used to- 
bacco by his absolute inability to draw a 
clean, straight line.” And nothing is 
more rigorously forbidden to an athlete 
or an athletic team in conscientious train- 
ing than all use of tobacco. At some of 
the best schools for boys in America, the 
use of tobacco in any form is absolutely 
prohibited. Yet these are the schools 
where the standards and ideals of manli- 
ness are highest. If smoking were a 
good thing, or essential to strong, manly 
character, these schools would be the first 
to introduce and encourage it. 

The standards of intelligent men in 
college are the same. Dr. Trumbull, in 
his little book, “ Border Lines in the Field 
of Doubtful Practices,” quotes the opin- 
ion of Dr. Seaver, the director of phys- 
ical culture at Yale, who “ has made care- 
ful experiments in the study of the effects 
of tobacco, as based on the examination 
and comparison of thousands of students, 
in a series of years. He speaks positively 


Shall I Smoke? III 


as to these effects in retarding growth 
and in affecting health. Moreover, he 
declares that ‘ the matter is of the highest 
importance as related not only to growth, 
but to morals and character.’ He has 
found that while only about five per cent. 
of the students of highest scholarship in 
that university use tobacco in any form, 
more than sixty per cent. of those who 
get no appointment, as a result of their 
standing in their studies, are tobacco 
users. Yet he is frank to say that ‘ this 
does not mean that mental decrepitude 
follows the use of tobacco.’ ” 

Some forms of the tobacco habit are 
more objectionable than others; but all 
are objectionable. All are unclean and 
contaminating, even the smoking of a 
pipe or of the finest cigar. And all are 
wasteful and enslaving. Some good men 
who smoke are very generous givers, but 
they might give also what they spend on 
tobacco; and many poorer men are pre- 
vented from giving to useful causes, or 
even from proper support of their fami- 
lies, by their waste upon tobacco. The 


112 A Young Man’s Questions 


habit is enslaving. It makes a man de- 
pendent. If he has to go without his 
pipe or cigar, it affects his temper or his 
mood, and he is not his own master. I 
was on a little excursion recently with a 
friend, and the circumstances were such 
that he could not smoke all day. He 
grew very restless, but at last, late in the 
afternoon, he was able to find a secluded 
place, where he got out his pipe, renewed 
the tobacco odour of his person, reestab- 
lished his peace of mind, and ended ‘his 
misery. Wherein did this differ from any 
other form of slavery, except in this, that 
the man had enslaved himself? 

I have never heard men go further in 
defense of the use of tobacco than to say 
that it is a simple and, on the whole, a 
harmless indulgence. But surely men 
have better things to do in life than to 
acquire habits of which this is the best 
that can be said. We cannot believe that 
Christ would acquire such habits were 
He here to-day, or that it pleases God to 
see His sons saturating their bodies, 
which He has taught them to regard as 


Shall I Smoke? 113 


temples of the Holy Ghost, with stale 
odours, or tainting them, however slight- 
ly, with poison. 


Ix 


AS TO THE THEATER 


Ir is a significant thing that such re- 
proach should attach to the stage. How 
does it come that “ actor” and “ hypoc- 
risy ” should be terms not of praise but of 
condemnation or disparagement? A 
“hypocrite ” was originally only a player. 
Now the term is a term of contempt and 
shame. The stage has done this for more 
than one word. It has a way of degrad- 
ing the language that it creates or that 
becomes associated with it. An “actor” 
etymologically is a “ doer,’ a “ worker.” 
But now an “ actor ” is a player, one who 
pretends to do. 

In the same way the stage not only de- 
grades words; it discredits in many ages 
and many lands the persons connected 
with it. Solon condemned the profession 
in ancient Greece as “tending, by its 
simulation of false character, and by its 


114 


As to the Theater 11s 


expression of sentiment not genuine or 
sincere, to corrupt the integrity of human 
dealings.” Actors, under the Roman re- 
public “became in the eye of the law 
infamis (disreputable) and incapable of 
holding any honourable office.” In China 
to-day actors are among the despised 
classes who are excluded from the Con- 
fucian examinations, and so debarred 
from all official and honourable position. 
Elsewhere actresses and actors are re- 
garded with a curious suspicion. The 
number who are admired and respected 
and might be admitted to some measure 
of social equality, are so few as to make 
the rest stand out in the more conspicuous 
disrepute. There is something in this 
that furnishes food for thought. 

One of the first results of such thought 
is the discovery that the reasons for 
this distrust and dislike of the theat- 
rical profession do not rest on imagi- 
nary grounds. Whatever may have been 
the character of actors and actresses 
when they went on the stage, it 
is undeniable that in multitudes of 


116 A Young Man’s Questions 


cases, the stage has worked to its de- 
generation. How could it be otherwise? 
As Mr. A. M. Palmer, the great theater 
manager says: “ The chief themes of the 
theater are now, as they ever have been, 
the passions of men; ambition leading to 
murder ; jealousy leading to murder; lust 
leading to adultery and to death; anger 
leading to madness.” 

Dr. Trumbull quotes, in his little book 
on “ Border Lines,” the computation of 
an English writer some years ago that at 
that time Henry Irving had “ committed 
at least fifteen thousand murders on the 
stage, while Mr. Barry Sullivan had 
added at least two thousand more stage 
murders than this to his list; that Mr. 
Charles Wyndham had been divorced 
from twenty-eight hundred wives—on 
the stage; that Mrs. Bancroft had in the 
same public place been ‘ foully betrayed 
or abducted’ thirty-two hundred times; 
that Miss Ada Cavendish had been “ be- 
trayed, deserted, or abducted’ fifty-six 
hundred times; and so on, along the list 
of popular actors.” And true acting con- 


As to the Theater 117 


sists in really entering into the spirit of 
the murderer, the betrayer, or the be- 
trayed. 

As Dr. Trumbull says: “There is noth- 
ing akin to it in any otherapproved sphere 
of art. A man may describe evil or 
portray it in literature, in poetry, in music, 
in painting, in sculpture, without putting 
himself into that exhibit of evil, without 
merging his personality in another per- 
sonality ; but in the art of the actor he who 
would portray the tyrant, the murderer, 
the adulterer, the seducer, or the betrayer 
of a sacred trust, must, in order to be the 
best actor, strive to think and feel and 
speak and act as if he were himself this 
very evil-doer.” 

Now, could any man go through all 
this, entering with real feeling into these 
acts of crime and passion, or what emo- 
tionally are such, without being affected 
by them? Perhaps some could but the 
great majority will inevitably be moulded 
and demoralised by them. Every honest- 
hearted man must feel the truth of this. 
“Let a pure man or a pure woman de- 


118 A Young Man’s Questions 


liberately plan and repeatedly endeavour 
to think and feel and seem to act as if 
impure, or even as it dallying with temp- 
tation and weighing the possible gains of 
impurity and crime—and can it be that 
impurity and crime will continue to have 
the same abhorrence of mien to such a 
person, as if their very semblance 
had been counted ever abhorrent ?” It 
is not strange that Macready would 
not allow his children to attend the 
theater. 

Of course, it may be freely admitted 
that there are exceptions, both in players 
and in plays; but Mr. Palmer knows what 
he is talking about in naming the chief 
themes of the theater, and the instinct 
that sets off actors and actresses in a 
class apart, a socially ostracised class, is 
an accurate instinct. If then the stage in 
its character and effects is what has been 
suggested, what right has a young man 
to encourage and support it? Can a 
young man justify himself in thus help- 
ing, for the sake of the personal amuse- 
ment or excitement he can get out of it, 


As to the Theater 11g 


to maintain an agency that debases what 
it touches ? 

“ But,” the young man says, “I recog- 
nise all this, but I don’t believe in aban- 
doning the theater absolutely because it is 
abused. It ought to be purified and made 
a great influence for good. The stage is 
a powerful educational agency. If good 
people wholly scorn it, it will just pander 
to the low tastes of people whose ideals 
are unworthy. We ought to try to influ- 
ence it. I don’t like the bad plays, and 
I don’t go to them. I select those that 
are wholesome and clean. Such plays 
do me good. They rest my mind and 
quicken my admirations and aspirations.” 

But is it possible to encourage the good 
without supporting the bad? Our in- 
tention may be to do this, but that will 
not be a guarantee that our conduct will 
have this effect. As Phillips Brooks wrote 
to a young woman on the subject of at- 
tending the theater: “I think it is better 
not to go. The trouble with the theater 
is its dreadful indiscriminateness. The 
same house which gives good Mrs. Vin- 


120 A Young Man’s Questions 


cent her benefit to-day may have almost 
anything to-morrow. What can we do 
with an institution like that?” 

Indeed, we may draw a line between 
what we think innocent and what harm- 
ful; but some one else without our dis- 
crimination, will draw his line a little 
farther over, and defend himself by our 
principle, for going to see what he calls 
harmless, but which we condemn. Often 
such a man will meet our criticism with 
the Bible verse, with which many a filthy 
man defends himself, “To the pure all 
things are pure.” So long as the stage is 
as unclean as it is, and acting involves, 
as it constantly does, the simulation of 
the basest passions and emotions, and this 
even in “ good plays,” it is almost impos- 
sible for a man to support it at all without 
in a real sense lending his support to it 
all. 

The idea of helping to purify the stage 
by patronising it is a futile idea. The 
influence of presence is inconsiderable. 
No one who goes to the theater often is 
likely to cherish the idea of exerting an 


As to the Theater 121 


influence upon the character of the stage 
by his personal attendance. It is wrong 
to attempt to reform an immorality by 
fostering and supporting it. 

Young men often say that they patron- 
ise the theater to uplift it, but they sel- 
dom say this honestly. It is an excuse 
for going, not a reason. They go for the 
amusement, the excitement, the show of 
it, and it influences them a hundred times 
more than they influence it. It affects 
them in many ways. It fosters unnat- 
uralism. It wastes their money. It 
arouses emotions with no opportunity for 
their exercise if by chance they are good, 
and only too much opportunity if they are 
evil. It provides an atmosphere in which 
base desires are born, and the glare, the 
enticement, the suggestions of it all, draw 
them on to worse things afterwards, when 
the imaginations of the evening bring 
forth their fruit of death in the acts of the 
night. When the influence of the theater 
stops far short of this, as of course it 
usually does, it yet breeds unnaturalness, 
fictitiousness of feeling, and a certain in- 


122 A Young Man’s Questions 


sincerity, the painfulness of which is all 
the greater because it is so often uncon- 
scious. 

, This is the psychological ground on 
which Professor James, of Harvard, 
objects to the theater: “ When a resolve 
or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to 
evaporate without bearing practical fruit 
it is worse than a chance lost; it works 
sO aS positively to hinder future resolu- 
tions and emotions from taking the nor- 
mal path of discharge. There is no more 
contemptible type of human character 
than that of the nerveless sentimental- 
ist and dreamer, who spends his life in a 
weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, 
but who never does a manly concrete 
deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the moth- 
ers of France, by his eloquence, to follow 
Nature and nurse their babies them- 
selves, while he sends his own children to 
the foundling hospital, is the classical ex- 
ample of what I mean. But every one of 
us in his measure, whenever, after glow- 
ing for an abstractly formulated Good, he 
practically ignores some actual case, 


As to the Theater 123 


among the squalid ‘other particulars’ 
of which that same Good lurks disguised, 
treads straight on Rousseau’s path. All 
Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of 
their concomitants, in this work-a-day 
world; but woe to him who can only rec- 
ognise them when he thinks them in their 
pure and abstract form! The habit of ex- 
cessive novel-reading and theater-going 
will produce true monsters in this line. The 
weeping of the Russian lady over the fic- 
titious personages in the play, while her 
coachman is freezing to death on his seat 
outside, is the sort of thing that every- 
where happens on a less glaring scale. 
Even the excessive habit of indulgence in 
music, for those who are neither perform- 
ers themselves nor musically gifted 
enough to take it in a purely intellectual 
way, has probably a relaxing effect upon 
the character. One becomes filled with 
emotions which habitually pass without 
prompting to any deed, and so the inertly 
sentimental condition is kept up.” 

To be sure, there are many men so 
strong that the theater affects them in 


124 A Young Man’s Questions 


none of these ways. But how trivial and 
unworthy is such a use of time for such 
men! With a world full of useful work 
to be done, and so few strong men to do 
it, with ten thousand great books to be 
read, each one of which will do the man 
more good and make him of more good 
to others than sitting for three hours 
looking at a “play,” with the hungry 
needing to be fed and the poor clothed 
and the ignorant taught, what a waste of 
time and money the theater involves! 
“But the best people go,” you say. 
What if they do? Every wrong that has 
ever lived in the world had this to be 
said in its defense. Moreover, what is 
meant by “best people?” Would Jesus 
go? Do you think you would find Him 
at “ L’Aiglon,” or “ Sappho,” or “ Floro- 
dora,” or even at “ The Little Minister,” 
or “A Fool’s Revenge?” If you did, 
would you think as much of Him as you 
did before? Do you deem the theater 
harmless and proper for your minister? 
We may be able to defend to ourselves 
our going to the theater, but we find 


As to the Theater 125 


difficulty in defending it to others. So 
also we ourselves persist in judging 
others by a standard we do not apply to 
ourselves. We do not want those we 
trust and revere to devote themselves to 
the attempt to uplift the stage by patron- 
ising it. On the other hand, if we want 
to hold the greatest influence over the 
lives of others, we will forego the attempt 
to reform the stage by supporting it. 
“We saw you coming out of the theater 
the other night,’ said two young men 
who saw no harm in the theater for them- 
selves, to a friend who was trying to 
win them to better things and to Christ. 
“We saw you. We don’t take any stock 
in your religion.” It was an unjust judg- 
ment, but Paul reckoned with such in the 
government of his life. “If meat make 
my brother to offend,” he said, “I will 
eat no flesh while the world standeth.” 
Can a Christian man conscientiously 
patronise an institution of which in a past 
day Macaulay said, “ Morality constantly 
enters into that world, a sound morality 
and an unsound morality ; the sound mor- 


126 A Young Man’s Questions 


ality to be insulted, derided, associated 
with everything mean and hateful; the 
unsound morality to be set off to every 
advantage and inculcated by all methods 
direct and indirect ;” and of which in this 
day, a dramatic critic, Mr. William Win- 
ter, declares, “Christian ethics on the 
stage would be as inappropriate as Mr. 
Owen’s Solon Shingle in the pulpit?” 


x 


THE YOUNG MAN AND MONEY 


“ CuHILon would say,” remarks Lord 
Bacon, “that gold was tried with the 
touchstone, and men with gold.” This 
is a wise word. Scarcely anything so 
strongly tests a young man’s character 
as money. Some men seem to be fair 
and high-minded and noble men until 
some question of money arises, and in a 
moment the real weakness of their nature 
is revealed, and they are shown to be 
common and inferior. A banker meets 
a stranger, and, as they talk about a cer- 
tain school, the banker says, “It is not 
generally known, but I am going to give 
it fifty thousand dollars.” A preacher in- 
vited to speak in a neighbouring city inti- 
mates that he cannot come for less than 
one hundred dollars. A traveller home 
from Europe relates his experience, and 
tells of his visit to this church or that 

127 


128 A Young Man’s Questions 


charity, and quite incidentally lets you 
know the amount of his donation to its 
support. A man who has treated you 
very cavalierly, perhaps contemptuously, 
becomes very obsequious to some one else 
who approaches and who has nothing to 
commend him to such deference but the 
fact that he is rich. Other men go up 
and down in their self-respect and their 
dignity of bearing among men with the 
tise or fall of their finances. Surely, as 
a wise man has said, “ Money does all 
things; for it gives and it takes away, it 
makes honest men and knaves, fools and 
philosophers.” 

The simple rule for a man is to deny 
to money the first place. It is a vulgar 
and ill-bred master in the first place, and 
it is a splendid and powerful servant out 
of it. Money is not everything. 


‘‘Get money, still get money, boy, 
No matter by what means” 


is the cynical advice of Ben Jonson. It 
is very bad advice. There are countless 
things better than money ; 


The Young Man and Money 129 


“ The splendour of the intellect’s advance; 
The social pleasures and their genial wit; 
The fascinations of the worlds of art; 
The glories of the worlds of nature, lit 
By large imagination's glowing heart; 
The rapture of mere being full of health.” 


Of course there are men, multitudes of 
them, who live for money, to whom 
money-getting has become life itself, and 
who can have no pleasure except in ac- 
cumulation of wealth. And there are 
classes of society, or at least groups of 
men, in which any other standard or am- 
bition is unintelligible, and the acquisi- 
tion of wealth is regarded as the first and 
unassailable axiom of life. But there are 
others who know better. It is nonsense, 
of course, to say that money is useless. 
It is not useless. It is absolutely neces- 
sary; and young men should seek to earn 
as much of it as they need for their own 
support, for capital for useful industry, 
and for philanthropy and benevolence. 
But use is the chief end of life, not gain. 

Every young man should begin early to 
save. He is unfortunate if his father has 


130 A Young Man’s Questions 


not taught him the responsibility of 
money and how to foresee his needs and 
to provide for them. When Jesus dis- 
couraged laying up treasure on the earth, 
He did not mean to forbid saving. Sav- 
ing money wisely is not laying up treas- 
ure. The money is not a treasure, any 
more than coal or potatoes in the bins in 
the cellar are treasures. Jesus possessed 
a bag, and Judas bore it. There was no 
rule that it should always be empty. If 
it is right to provide for the necessities of 
this evening’s meal, it is right for a man 
to provide for his boy’s education five or 
ten years from now. 

Young men will find it easier to save 
if they put their savings in a separate ac- 
count, keeping it in a savings bank or in- 
vesting it in good securities. It is folly 
to touch speculation. Of course it is 
worse than folly. Much speculation is 
simply a form of gambling. Don’t be ~ 
tempted by it. Put your savings in reli- 
able investments. Don’t select them by 
answering advertisements, or by wild 
guesses of your own. Ask some honest 


The Young Man and Money 131 


and prudent man, who is in a position to 
know, and follow his advice. Only re- 
member that you, and not he, must bear 
the responsibility. 

The young man who saves will not 
need to borrow, and will keep himself 
free from debt. Freedom is the right 
word to use. Debt is slavery. It kills 
the sense of independent manliness. 

“You must not go into debt,” wrote 
Henry Ward Beecher to his son. “ Avoid 
debt as you would the devil. Make it a 
fundamental rule: No debt—cash -or 
nothing. The art of making one’s for- 
tune is to spend nothing; in this coun- 
try, any intelligent and industrious young 
man may become rich if he stops all leaks, 
and is not in a hurry. Do not make 
haste; be patient. Do not speculate or 
gamble. Steady, patient industry is both 
the surest and safest way.” 

John Ruskin thundered even more ter- 
ribly against debt. The following letter 
he wrote to an applicant for help to pay 
a debt on a chapel: 

“Sir: I am scornfully amused at your 


132 A Young Man’s Questions 


appeal to me, of all people in the world 
least likely to give you a farthing. My 
first word to all men and boys who care 
to hear me is, ‘Don’t get mto debt; 
starve and go to heaven—but don’t bor- 
row. Try first begging. I don’t mind, if 
it is really needful, stealing. But don’t 
buy things you can’t pay for!’ And of 
all manner of debtors, pious people build- 
ing churches they can’t pay for are the 
most detestable nonsense to me. Can’t 
you preach and pray behind the hedges— 
on in a sandpit—or a coal hole—first?” 

Ruskin did not mean to approve of 
stealing. He did mean to anathematise 
borrowing. “ Owe no man anything,” de- 
clares Paul. . 

If no young man borrows, no young 
man will have to face the problem of 
lending. It is sometimes a hard problem. 
To be sure it is sometimes easy. Advan- 
cing money on security, as the banks do, - 
is a straight business proposition. But 
lending money among young men is not 
this. Too often it is a sort of euphe- 
mistic method of theft. A good practical 


The Young Man and Money 133 


rule is to lend where you would be willing 
to give and what you would be willing 
to give. Then if you lose it, you have 
been prepared for its loss. 

In his advice to his son, which has been 
quoted, Beecher said also: ‘“‘ Make few 
promises. Religiously observe the small- 
est promise.” Be scrupulously careful in 
all statements.” Some men of high posi- 
tion are utterly mistrusted by those who 
know them well, because of the complete 
unreliability of their promises. They 
subscribe liberally and never pay. Re- 
deem your pledges at any cost to yourself, 
or secure an honourable release from them. 
As for bills and liabilities, young men 
should meet them instantly. It is better 
to pay as you go. If things are charged 
and bills submitted later, pay the bill by 
return mail. 

What men can’t afford to pay for, it is 
wrong for them to buy. Buying it is a 
species of theft. ‘ Here is a man,” said 
Canon Newboldt, preaching recently on 
Justice, “ who fancies that he would like 
to become the owner of something which 


134 A Young Man’s Questions 


he sees in a shop. Perhaps he is moved 
by some sudden whim; perhaps, poor 
creature! he is driven to desperation by 
the pangs of hunger. He watches his op- 
portunity and appropriates the property, 
then, probably, finds himself convicted as 
a thief, and in the strong clutches of 
outraged law. But, here is a man, well- 
dressed and well-supplied with the neces- 
saries of life, moved by no unbearable 
pangs of hunger. He passes the samé 
shop, he is moved with the same desire 
of acquiring, but he, instead of stealing, 
goes in and buys it and does not pay for 
it, knowing that he cannot pay for it 
then, and, perhaps, will have some diffi- 
culty in paying for it all. I ask you, 
in the sight of God, has he not virtually 
stolen those goods, although no magis- 
trate condemns him and no penalty fol- 
lows on his act?” 

All extravagance and luxury beyond a 
man’s plane are wrong. A simple, frugal 
life is better for every man of every plane. 
In dress, in food, in furniture, in all the 
equipment of life, the prayer of Agur 


The Young Man and Money 135 


is the wise prayer for us: “Give me 
neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with 
food convenient for me.” 

The peril of money is in its power to 
possess its possessor. A little money we 
can control. But a great deal of money 
is sure to control us. It at once hedges 
us in. As a matter of fact, great wealth 
deprives its owners of more than it brings 
them. “ The rich,” observed the melan- 
choly Burton, “are indeed rather pos- 
sessed by their money than possessors.” 

Young men should acquire the habit of 
giving. It is a habit difficult of acquire- 
ment in late years. Unless it is fixed 
early, growing wealth shuts up the heart 
and holds the will, so that the man cannot 
give. Begin with setting aside some fixed 
portion of what you receive. Make this 
at least a tenth as soon as you can. Ad- 
minister this portion as a trust fund, and 
so in time you will come to feel about all 
that God sends, that it is not yours but 
His, and to be used for Him. 

It is not possible to have too strict or 
nice a sense of honour in this matter of 


136 A Young Man’s Questions 


money. It is of course possible to carry 
some good prejudices too far, as the man 
did who refused to accept any other man’s 
hospitality or friendly help because he 
was not in a position to return it. That 
is making money and not manhood the 
supreme thing. Money is not the supreme 
thing. “The man’s the gowd.” And the 
gold of that man is purest and most un- 
dimmed whose three chief qualities are 
first, veracity; second, generosity; and 
third, thrift. 


XI 
IS IT WRONG TO BET? 


THE last weeks of every foot-ball sea- 
son are critical weeks in the lives of many 
young men in the colleges and prepara- 
tory schools of this country. Seed is 
sown then which will yield a baleful har- 
vest. Years hence some men would give 
thousands of dollars to undo what is done 
during these days. On the surface these 
days are distinguished from other seasons 
of the school and college year only by the 
fact that the great foot-ball games are 
played then and the question of suprem- 
acy decided. But beneath the surface 
they are marked as the same weeks are 
marked every year by the sowing of acts 
from which men will reap habits and 
characters and destinies. Thousands of 
dollars are bet on the issue of these 
games. Men who never gambled before 
stake their own or their fathers’ money 


137 


138 A Young Man’s Que fing 


on their favourite college. That is one 
sowing. Others who have never before 
known what it was to surrender their 
wills and their manhood to an appetite 
have in their first drunkenness tasted the 
joys of the brute and waked to the con- 
sciousness of the loss of their birthright 
of purity and power. I have seen many 
foolish freshmen reeling in their first 
drunkenness after one of these games and 
have blessed God that their mothers have 
not seen them. This is another sowin 
And yet, after all, these things are not 
beneath the surface. They lie very open 
to the eyes of all. A prominent part of 
the newspaper accounts is the record of 
the betting and the drinking, of the stu- 
dents bankrupt in pocket and addled of 
brain. These accounts amuse some. 
They anger others. They make many 
sad. Some to whom life is a noble and 
holy thing are made to feel by them that 
if intercollegiate games are simply to be- 
come a moral ruin for foolish students, 
without the wit to know what is folly and 
the will to despise it, they had better be 


_ Be 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 139 


once for all abandoned. Not because 
there is any harm in them or any evil to 
the men who play in them, but because 
those who sit on the benches around the 
field and look on, want so wofully that 
clear moral sense which marks the games 
themselves and the men upon the field. 
As between games polluted with the 
maudlin enthusiasm of drink and defiled 
with the dishonour of the gambler, I 
would choose, knowing well what the 
choice would mean, no games at all. 
And I should think that all friends of 
intercollegiate athletics would see that it 
is to the detriment of the games in the 
minds of all those whose good opinion is 
desirable, to lower them to the level of 
the cock-pit and the race-track. The 
surest way to injure and destroy intercol- 
legiate games is to bet on them. 

But I wish to say something about 
betting on much broader grounds than 
these. 

For, first of all, the man who loses on 
a bet is spending his money in a wrong 
and immoral way. He gets nothing 


140 A Young Man’s Questions 


for it. He accomplishes nothing with it. 
It is a sheer waste, serving no useful 
purpose and doing no good. No man 
has a right to use money in this way. 
Money is stored personality. There is 
human blood in it, coined in the gold and 
pressed out in the paper. All money is 
the price of life. To waste it is like draw- 
ing life-blood and flinging it upon the 
ground. And often the money lost is 
not a man’s own. Most students gamble 
with money that is not theirs for such use. 
Fathers and mothers are making sacri- 
fices for their education, or are putting 
money in their hands, trusting their 
honour for its honourable use. To gam- 
ble away such money is a species of filial 
treason so dishonourable as to suggest 
that the man who is guilty of it has lost 
the capacity to know what honour is. 
And even when the money is the man’s 
own, such waste of it is awful in such a 
world of need as ours. With millions 
of little children suffering for the want of 
the simplest comforts and care, with all 
charitable and benevolent institutions 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 141 


straitened for want of support, with a 
third of the human race hungry and in 
need, with the devil’s enterprises of crime 
and lust and sin flourishing, and Christ’s 
ministries of strength and purity cramped, 
the deliberate waste of money by the bet- 
tor who loses is dastardly. 

But_if losing money by betting. is 
wrong and immoral, gaining money by 
betting is more so. I cannot put what I 
would say about this immorality as 
strongly as Phillips Brooks puts it in his 
sermon on “ The Choice Young Man:” 

“Money to the simple, healthy human 
sense is but the representative of energy 
and power. It is to pass from man to 
man only as the symbol of some exertion, 
some worthy outputting of strength and 
life. Save in the way of charity, it is 
not to be given or taken without some- 
thing behind it which it represents. With 
his mind full of this simple, honest truth, 
feeling himself ready to earn his living 
and to give an equivalent for all that he 
receives, the young man ought to have 
an instinctive dislike and scorn for all 


142 A Young Man’s Questions 


transactions which would substitute feeble 
chance for vigorous desert, and make him 
either the giver or receiver of that which 
has not even the show of an equivalent or 
earning. I do not say that gambling and 
betting are admirable or respectable 
things in grey-haired men. It is not of 
them or to them that I am speaking now. 
I do say that in young men, with the 
abundance of life within them and around 
them, gambling and betting, if they be not 
the result of merest thoughtlessness, are 
signs of a premature demoralisation 
which hardly any other vice can show. 
In social life, in club, in college, on the 
street, the willingness of young men to 
give or to receive money on the mere turn 
of chance is a token of the decay of man- 
liness and self-respect which is more 
alarming than almost anything besides. 
It has an inherent baseness about it which 
not to feel shows a base soul. To carry 
in your pocket money which has become 
yours by no use of your manly powers, 
which has ceased to be another man’s by 
no willing acceptance on his part of its 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 143 


equivalent,—that is a degrading thing. 
Will it not burn the purse in which you 
hold it? Will it not blight the luxury for 
which you spend it? Will you dare to 
buy the gift of true love with it? Will 
you offer it in charity? Will you pay it 
out for the support of your innocent chil- 
dren? Will it not be a Judas-treasure, 
which you must not put into the treasury, 
because it is the price of blood? 

“So I rank high among the signs of a 
choice human youth the clearness of sight 
and the healthiness of soul which make a 
man refuse to have anything to do with 
the transference of property by chance, 
which make him hate and despise betting 
and gambling under their most approved 
and fashionable and accepted forms. 
Plentiful as those vices are among us, 
they still have in some degree the grace to 
recognise their own disgracefulness by 
the way in which they conceal themselves. 
Some sort of hiding and disguise they 
take instinctively. Let even that help to 
open our eyes to what they really are. 
To keep clear of concealment, to keep 


144 A Young Man’s Questions 


clear of the need of concealment, to do 
nothing which he might not do out on 
the middle of Boston Common at noon- 
day,—I cannot say how more and more 
that seems to me to be the glory of a 
young man’s life. It is an awful hour 
when the first necessity of hiding any- 
thing comes. The whole life is different 
henceforth. When there are questions to 
be feared and eyes to be avoided and sub- 
jects which must not be touched, then the 
bloom of life is gone. Put off that day 
as long as possible. Put it off forever if 
you can. And as you will hold no truth 
for which you cannot give a reason, so 
let yourself be possessed of no dollar 
whose history you do not dare to tell.” 

“ But,” replies the man who bets, “ it 
it not for the money that I bet. I don’t 
care for the money that may be won. 
The fact that I take my chance of losing 
shows that the money at stake is not the 
chief thing.” But why then do you bet 
for money? Why not bet your dollars 
against marbles or buttons? That would 
show distinctly your disregard and con- 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 145 


tempt for the money element, and surely 
would give to your betting a “ manlier ” 
air. What is it for which you bet if not 
for the money that may be won? “Oh,” 
says the man who bets, “ it is for the ex- 
citement and interest of the thing.” But 
what makes it exciting? It is the fact 
that you stand to win or to lose money. 
If it is the “excitement” that you want 
and that chiefly, would you not get more 
of it and of an intenser sort if you would 
bet your dollars against marbles or but- 
tons? For then if you won, you would 
win nothing, and if you lost you would 
lose everything. This would doubtless 
make the matter less exciting to the man 
who bets against you hoping to win 
money, because he would have nothing to 
lose, but how much more exciting and in- 
teresting it would make it for you who, 
of course, do not bet for the money, but 
only for the pleasurable emotions of the 
thing! And why, if men do not bet for 
the money that may be won, do they re- 
frain from betting when they think they 
will lose, or, if the chances are unfavour- 


146 A Young Man’s Questions 


able, demand odds in their betting, or bet 
with so much greater freedom and bold- 
ness when they think they are sure of 
winning ? 

“ Well,”’ replies the man who bets, “ of 
course, the money element is in it. But 
that’s only to make it real and manly and 
sportsmanlike, you know. The real 
reason for betting is to show one’s inter- 
est in his college, to back up his own col- 
lege team.” This I say is pitiable and 
squalid. The man who has sunk so low 
as this, who can regard this as the noble 
and manly way to support his team and 
show his sympathy with his college must 
be very thoughtless or have a shrunken 
and poverty-stricken spirit. How it must 
make the soul of John Harvard or Elihu 
Yale or Jonathan Edwards swell with 
pride and contentment to see a crowd of 
juvenile gamblers showing their respect 
and affection for his institution by stak- 
ing a gambler’s honour to pay money if 
one of its athletic teams should be proved 
to be inferior to an opponent! This is 
“backing the University.” “ Backing ” 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 147 


it against whom? Against gamblers. 
What a noble way this is to honour it, and 
to show sympathy with it. Would Jesus . 
have shown His sympathy for the world 
better if He had made a wager on it than 
by living and working and dying for it? 

And I should like to say a word regard- 
ing the idea of “supporting the team” 
by betting on it, from the point of view 
of the men who play. No self-respecting 
player is pleased with the thought that he 
is ranked with game-cocks and race- 
horses and bull-terriers and prize-fighters. 
Have the players no right to manly con- 
sideration? They are not in the game 
for money. In my college days we played 
for the love of the college. No money 
could have bought some men to do it. 
And it seems a contemptible thing to take 
advantage of such men and make money 
on them or get “ excitement” by staking 
money on them. The players do the 
work and the bettors have the easy time 
and try to win money through the 
work of others which they are giving to 
their college and would scorn to take 


148 A Young Man’s Questions 


money for. But the man who bets does 
not think of this. The unmanliness and 
dishonourableness of it are hid from him 
by that blindness whichpreventshim from 
seeing just how contemptible his conduct 
appears to people of healthy sense. The 
man who bets loses his ability to respect 
others because the readiness and the de- 
sire to take money for nothing, in return 
for no honest effort or desire of his own, 
make it impossible for him to have a 
genuine, high respect even for himself. 
Of course, no student means to let his 
character be defiled in this way. But the 
habit of betting kills the knightly in- 
stincts. When President Garfield’s life 
was hanging in the balance, gamblers sold 
pools upon the issue and many men did 
not scruple to win money from his death. 
This is a hideous extreme, but the prac- 
tice of betting on the length of the ser- 
mon or the prayer in college chapel in- 
volves precisely the same principle of 
blunted sensibility and coarseness of na- 
ture. Walpole even “tells of a gambler 
who fell at the table in a fit of apoplexy, 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 149 


and his companions began to bet upon the 
chances of his recovery. When the phy- 
sician came in they would not let him 
bleed the man because they said it would 
affect the bet.” 

And as for the contention that betting 
money is sportsmanlike, the very reverse 
is true. Nothing will so surely kill sport. 
I know that “ popularly betting is sup- 
posed to be the very life of sport. The 
betting man is supposed to be the true 
sportsman. But the very opposite is true. 
There can be no whole-hearted love of 
sport where there is betting. To a man 
who habitually bets, there is no attraction 
in a game of. whist or billiards, or in a 
horse race, on which no money depends. 
Notoriously, it is the betting which draws 
crowds to the race-course, and keeps the 
crowds anxiously awaiting the result in 
remote parts of the country. And there 
are many eager and constant whist play- 
ers for whom all interest in the game 
lapses if they cannot play for money. 
Sport in itself ceases to be of interest to 
the man who has staked a large amount 


150 A Young Man’s Questions 


upon the issue. He is absorbed in the 
issue for himself, and has no room for 
any pleasure in the sport. It becomes 
deadly earnest to him. It is therefore not 
sport that is fostered by the betting men 
that gather round the contest ; it is money- 
getting, money-getting under such cir- 
cumstances as taint the gains. Between 
the man who plays for play’s sake, and 
the man who plays, or watches play, for a 
money stake, there can surely be no ques- 
tion which is the truer sportsman. . . . 
It is this that drives sober people from the 
race-course, and from other manly and 
exhilarating amusements, and, instead of 
promoting true sport, brings it down to a 
mere carnival of greed, fraud, and trick- 
enya 

And it is this that introduces profes- 
sionalism into college athletics. When 
men stake money, they are willing to do 
dishonourable things to shape the result 
so that they will win. Betting is the 
deadly foe of true sport. The true sports- 
man is a man like Marshall Newell who 
“loved sport for sport’s sake alone.” 


Is It Wrong to Bet? = 151 


The introduction of money is fatal. Dur- 
ing the Persian wars, though bribery and 
corruption were common, the Greeks kept 
the games pure. Men strove for the 
glory of victory and the chaplet of olive 
leaves. ‘‘ Heavens! Mardonius,” ex- 
claimed one of the Persians before the 
battle of Salamis, when he learned about 
the prizes, ““ What sort of men have you 
brought us to fight against, who strive 
not for money but for honour?” No 
money stake was allowed to corrupt the 
conflicts or debase the purity of the sports 
of Greece. And the training of these 
pure sports played a large part in prepar- 
ing the Greeks for the mighty conflicts 
with the hosts from Asia. 

In every bet both men are sharers in 
dishonesty and wrongdoing, for the man 
who loses spends his money immorally, 
and the man who wins gains his with 
greater immorality. But further than 
this, betting is vile because its principle is 
snobbery and conceit. It rests_on the as- 
sumption that the man who bets knows 
more than his partner to the wager or that_ 


152 A Young Man’s Questions 


his opinion is better. Suppose that he does 
know more and that his opinion is better. 
Then he is acting meanly in taking advan- 
tage of a more ignorant man, with the 
purpose of making money out of his 
ignorance. “Well,” it is said, “the other 
man is willing. He goes in with his eyes 
open and takes his chances.” Yes but 
what chance does he take other than the 
certainty of losing if you really know 
more than he does? And wherein does 
this make it a manlier business to win 
money from his ignorance? 

As Charles Kingsley has said: “If 
you and he bet on any event (e. g. 
racing), you think that your horse will 
win ; he thinks that his will; in plain Eng- 
lish, you think that you know more about 
the matter than he; you try to take ad- 
vantage of his ignorance; and so to con- 
jure money out of his pocket into yours 
—a very noble and friendly attitude to 
stand to your neighbour, truly. That is 
the plain English of it; and look at it up- 
ward, downward, sideways, inside ouf, 
you will never make anything out of bet- 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 153 


ting save this—that it is taking advantage 
of your neighbour’s supposed ignorance. 
But says some one,“ That is all fair; he 
is trying to do as much by me.’ Just so, 
and that again is a very noble and 
friendly attitude for two men who have 
no spite against each other; a state of 
mutual distrust and unmercifulness, look- 
ing each selfishly to his own gain, regard- 
less of the interest of the other.” 

As between two sharpers, each trying 
to outwit the other, one wastes no sym- 
pathy. But we do pity the unsophis- 
ticated countryman who bets his money 
against the three-card-monte man. The 
fact that he is willing to be fooled does 
not make the gambler’s part in fleecing 
him any more manly and upright. It 
makes it the more contemptible. The 
duellist is willing to be killed, but that 
does not make duelling legal. This is the 
way the law and the police regard it, and 
they strive to protect such men. They 
pity their ignorance. A very noble and 
fine spirit it is, is it not? which 
leads a college man to justify his bet with 


154 A Young Man’s Questions 


a man more ignorant, less well-informed 
than himself, and who bets against super- 
ior knowledge, on the ground that the 
man is willing to be taken in. 

“But,” apologises the man who bets 
in such conditions, “‘ the other man thinks 
he knows more than I do. He doesn’t. 
I know more than he does, but he will 
not believe this. I must back my word 
with my money.” But how low has the 
man fallen who grovels around on this 
plane! How inferior and discreditable is 
the level of life when respect for a man’s 
word must be secured by staking money! 
And what kind of an opinion must that 
be which a man advances and can’t leave 
to stand on its merit but must bolster with 
a gambler’s cheek and a gambler’s cash! 
Some may say that this is too harshly 
spoken but what can besaidthatistoo harsh 
of the degradation of life from the level of 
a fair, free, trustful, high-minded inter- 
course to the level of the race-track and 
the gutter and the bar, where in coarse 
language, men say, “ Money talks?” Let 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 155 


the people talk in that way who do not 
know how to talk otherwise. 4 ., 
What I have just been saying has been 
with reference to the cases where one man 
bets on his knowledge against another 
man’s ignorance. But suppose the man 
who bets does not know more than the 
man with whom he bets. And this, of 
course, men will say will be the case 
among “gentlemen.” “We would not 
bet on a sure thing or where we knew we 
would win,” they say. “ That would not 
be honourable and square.” But as a mat- 
ter of fact, almost no man bets when he 
knows he will lose. If he does he does 
wrong, having no right to spend money 
in that way. Men bet when they think or 
hope they will win. There is a chance 
that they may lose, but there is a chance, 
too, that they may win and they bet on 
the strength of that chance. And pre- 
cisely because they do, John Ruskin de- 
nounces betting as the vilest and most 
ungentlemanly of habits. “ You concen- 
trate your interest upon a matter of 


156 A Young Man’s Questions 


chance, instead of upon a subject of true 
knowledge, and you back opinions, . . . 
simply because they are your own. All 
the insolence of egotism is in this, and so 
far as the love of excitement is implicated 
with the hope of winning money, you 
turn yourself into the basest sort of 
tradesman—those who live by specula- 
tion.” Moreover, betting upon an uncer- 
tainty in this way is demoralising and 
debilitating. It involves commitment to 
an opinion of whose truth it is impossible 
for the man who bets to know. 

I believe, therefore, that whether a man 
bets and loses or bets and wins, whether 
hebetson superior knowledge or on a total 
uncertainty, he is doing a dishonest and 
an immoral thing. It is true, further, that 
gambling is folly because the gambler is 
sure to lose in the end. A few may grow 
rich and die rich. The multitudes lose 
and lose. Gambling is simply foolish. 
“In many cases,’ as Marcus Dods has 
pointed out, “the gambler himself is con- 
scious of his folly, and therefore excuses 
himself. He merely wishes to experi- 


Is It Wrong to Bet? = 157 


ment; he wants a little fun, and so forth. 
But the estimation in which the world 
holds the gambler becomes apparent 
when he loses. The merchant whose 
losses are the result of untoward and un- 
foreseen changes in the market receives 
sympathy and help. But what bank or 
private friend will advance money to a 
gambler? The betting man who has 
staked his last shilling and lost it is pro- 
nounced a fool, and has put himself be- 
yond the reach of practical compassion. 
The sharper who has fleeced him has 
neither gratitude nor pity. He uses his 
victim as the butt of his ridicule. And 
the victim himself, who has risked his 
money on mere chance, or on baseless in- 
formation, or on fraudulent representa- 
tions, freely pronounces himself a fool, 
judging himself in the light of the issue. 
To fancy that we shall be exceptions and 
win where others have lost, that we shall 
be the solitary lucky ones among the 
thousand unlucky, is a folly to which we 
are all liable, but it is none the less a 
folly.” 


158 A Young Man’s Questions 


But I am putting the matter not on the 
ground of policy but on the ground 
of principle. And on that ground I say 
that it is wrong to bet, whatever be the 
stake or whoever the fellow gambler. 
The principle is the same whether we bet 
with men or women, for candy, or gloves, 
or drinks of whatever sort, or money, 
over athletics, elections, cards or any- 
thing else. And to excuse ourselves in 
these little gamblings,—“ just an inno- 
cent, friendly little bet, you know, I don’t 
mind if I do lose’”’—is to educate our- 
selves into the inability to see that prin- 
ciples are principles, and that a lie or a 
dishonesty or an immorality does not be- 
come harmless and allowable by being 
small. If we want to “treat” people or 
to make them presents let us do so in a 
sincere, open, generous way without the 
ill-concealed and very ill-mannered sub- 
terfuge of a wager, by which perhaps 
we may win some small payment from 
them. Let life be open and free. Cleanse 
it of the petty nastiness and tawdry ex- 
citement of the pool-room and the prize- 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 159 


ring. Let friendship be generous, giving 
and hoping for nothing again, unpolluted 
by the mercenary selfishness of the 
gambler. “To those who are not be- 
guiled by custom,’ says Marcus Dods, 
“it is difficult to understand how of two 
friends one can put his hands in the 
other’s pocket and stoop to be profited by 
the other’s loss. Be it a half-crown or 
five thousand pounds, it is equally in- 
comprehensible how a gentleman can 
receive it from his friend. If the sum is 
small, there is a meanness in being in- 
debted for it; if it is large, there is a 
meanness in depriving his friend of it. 
There is a pleasure in receiving a gift 
from a friend as the expression of his 
remembrance and affection; none in win- 
ning from him money which he is com- 
pelled to pay. The small trader who 
would scorn to put money in his till for 
which he had not given an equivalent is, 
forsooth, looked down upon by the so- 
called gentlemen who with equanimity 
pocket what makes their friend poorer, 
and which they have done nothing to 


160 A Young Man’s Questions 


earn. Nothing is more likely to damage 
the character and eat out the other quali- 
ties which are associated with the title of 
gentleman, than the practice of betting.” 

And yet though principle and not policy 
should govern our convictions and our 
conduct in this as in all things, it should 
be suggested to the man who bets that his 
study of futures should not omit a candid 
consideration of the future of the 
gambler. The gambling classes are the 
least respected and the least efficient 
classes in society as the gambling races 
are the low and backward races. The 
corruption of Chinese politics and govern- 
ment is as much the result as the cause 
of the gambling instincts which dominate 
the Chinese, and no other nation than the 
Chinese, perhaps, has the native fibre and 
strength to stand, as the Chinese people 
have stood, the rotting influences of a uni- 
versal and reckless lust for the dishonest 
gains of chance. Among our own ac- 
quaintances, who are the men who bet 
and whither are they bound? Doubtless 
men high-minded and refined in other 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 161 


things have bet, but you never saw a man 
who had acquired the habit of betting 
whose face was not downward turned and 
his back to the things that are honourable 
and just and true. “ Sporting men” we 
call a certain class with whom betting has 
become a fixed habit or a profession. 
They stand about the bars the night be- 
fore the elections, they crowd around the 
prize-ring, they throng the trains to and 
from the races, they fill the pool-rooms. 
Some of them are pleased to class the col- 
lege games among the objects of their 
attention. So many of their tastes have 
been atrophied and so many of their 
capacities slain that they have no interest 
in what interests those who love fine and 
noble things. They have even lost the 
taste in dress which would enable them 
to dress like gentlemen. 

Scarcely any vice works more disas- 
trously on character than the vice of bet- 
ting. It enamours men of the idea of get- 
ting something for nothing. That is a 
debilitating idea that will unmake any 
man. It fosters lying, deception, bluff. 


162 A Young Man’s Questions 


It leads to the use of foul means to influ- 
ence the issue over which the bet is made. 
It begets crime. Mr. Wrixon (late Attor- 
ney-General of Victoria) says of Austra- 
lia: “ Betting and gambling with us have 
assumed proportions that threaten us so- 
cially. Hundreds bet to an extent which 
they cannot honestly afford, the springs of 
upright industry are weakened by the 
vague hopes of questionable gains, and 
when these hopes are disappointed, as 
they generally are, embezzlement and 
fraud are too often the result. An un- 
healthy restlessness, fatal to sober work 
for fair reward, spreads among the 
young, who know no better, and spoils 
many a life that, free from this taint, 
would have been useful and happy. I 
can confidently say from many years’ ex- 
perience in criminal courts, and latterly 
from a special knowledge of public prose- 
cutions, that most cases of forgery and 
embezzlement among young men are 
either owing to, or at least coincident with 
habits of betting and gambling.” “ Bet- 
ting,” says Dr. Dods, “ is a prolific source 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 163 


of crime. . . . It is the unanimous and 
unambiguous testimony of chaplains and 
governors of prisons that the great pro- 
portion of the crimes of embezzlement 
and theft are the result of betting. The 
statistics of suicide also prove that betting 
is responsible for a larger number of cases 
than drunkenness.” It prostitutes life, 
killing its freshness and spontaneity. It 
cultivates distrust. It overheats the mem- 
branes of a man’s moral nature and then 
deadens them, alternately inflaming and 
chilling them until they are callous. In 
Herbert Spencer’s words, “It sears the 
sympathies.” It distracts a man’s atten- 
tion, wastes his time and spoils the relia- - 
bility of his judgment. As Dr. Martineau 
says: “ To fasten one’s interest and curi- 
osity on the order of eve:its (the order of 
incalculable contingency when the compo- 
sition of determining agencies defies all 
foresight) is to school oneself in all that 
is weak and contemptible in character, 
and live by guesswork. ... The habit 
of excitement upon chances alternating 
with mortification at their rebuffs, grows 


164 A Young Man’s Questions 


by what it feeds on, and rapidly passes 
into moral ruin. There is no dry-rot that 
spreads so fast from the smallest speck 
upon the character.” The gambler has 
his reward, but who does not pity the 
blindness which makes him willing ta 
pay its cost? 

This is an honest and frank view of the 
matter of betting. It is the view that 
your fathers would want you to consider, 
—and your mothers, your hearts have 
added that. It was thus that Charles 
Kingsley wrote to his son when in one of 
the English public schools. 


“My Dearest Boy: 

“There is a matter which gave me 
much uneasiness when you mentioned it. 
You said you had put into some lottery 
for the Derby and had hedged to make it 
safe. 

“ Now all this is bad, bad, nothing but 
bad. Of all habits gambling is the one I 
hate most and have avoided most. Of 
all habits it grows most on eager minds. 
Success and loss alike make it grow. Of 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 165 


all habits, however much civilised men 
may give way to it, it is one of the most 
intrinsically savage. Historically it has 
been the peace excitement of the lowest 
brutes in human form for ages past. 
Morally it is unchivalrous and unChris- 
tian. 

“1. It gains money by the lowest and 
most unjust means, for it takes money 
out of your neighbour’s pocket without 
giving him anything in return. 

“2. It tempts you to use what you 
fancy your superior knowledge of a 
horse’s merits—or anything else—to your 
neighbour’s harm. 

“Tf you know better than your neigh- 
bour you are bound to give him your 
advice. Instead you conceal your 
knowledge to win from his ignorance; 
hence come all sorts of concealments, 
dodges, deceits—I say the Devil is the 
only father of it. I’m sure, moreover, 
that B. would object seriously to anything 
like a lottery, betting or gambling. 

“T hope you have not won. I should 
not be sorry for you to lose. If you have 


166 A Young Man’s Questions 


won I should not congratulate you. If 
you wish to please me, you will give back 
to its lawful owners the money you have 
won. If you are a loser in gross thereby, 
I will gladly re-imburse your losses this 
time. As you had put in you could not 
in honour draw back till after the event. 
Now you can give back your money, say- 
ing you understand that Mr. B. and your 
father disapprove of such things, and so 
gain a very great moral influence. 

“ Recollect always that the stock argu- 
ment is worthless. It is this: “My friend 
would win from me if he could, therefore 
I have an equal right to win from him.’ 
Nonsense. The same argument would 
prove that I have a right to maim or kill 
a man if only I give him leave to maim 
or kill me if he can and will. 

“T have spoken my mind once and 
for all on a matter on which I have held 
the same views for more than twenty 
years, and trust in God you will not for- 
get my words in after life. I have seen 
many a good fellow ruined by finding 
himself one day short of money, and try- 


Is It Wrong to Bet? 167 


ing to get a little by play or betting—and 
then the Lord have mercy on his simple 
soul, for simple it will not remain long. 

“ Mind, I am not the least angry with 
you. Betting is the way of the world. 
So are all the seven deadly sins under 
certain rules and pretty names, but to the 
Devil they lead if indulged in, in spite of 
the wise world and its ways. 

“YouR LOVING PATER.” 


And now, perhaps, some will say, 
“Yes, what you say is all right from your 
point of view, but your opinions are too 
narrow. I am not so straight-laced.” 
Well, “ straight-laced ” is a word much 
used by the thoughtless or by those whose 
intellectual processes are timid and in- 
exact and who are afraid of their con- 
sciences and whose tastes incline them 
with desire to go with the herd. But 
it is only a word. And the man who 
replies to what has been said in this 
way probably illustrates my contention 
—that with gambling and betting no 
high-minded man, who loves the things 


168 A Young Man’s Questions 


which are worthy and open and true, and 
who will stop to think, will have anything 


to do. 


XII 
HIS AMUSEMENTS 


Ir some young man, reading these 
chapters is disposed to feel that they are 
altogether too stiff for him, and that the 
ideal set up is an impracticable ideal, I 
desire to correct him at once. This ideal 
is not impracticable, for I know scores of 
men who realise it with unwavering con- 
sistency in their lives. They are free from 
all big vices and from all petty ones. 
They would rather die than lie. They hate 
evil. They never use liquor or tobacco in 
any form. They observe Sunday with 
scrupulous care. They never visit the 
theater. They shun all mean companion- 
ships, they bear themselves toward all men 
and women as a gentleman should, and 
they are as honest and dependable as the 
sun. If any young man says that this is 
more than can be expected of any man,the 

-truth requires us to contradict him. 


169 


170 A Young Man’s Questions 


Thousands of men are living just this 
kind of life. 

And they are thoroughly happy in it, 
happier far than any men are who are 
living otherwise, and against the highest 
law of their natures. Their lives are 
overflowing with good cheer and good- 
ness. Men are not shut out of all amuse- 
ment and sport because certain habits and 
tastes are barred as unworthy. They 
have all. outdoors open to them, and a 
good deal of indoors, too. Football, base- 
ball, golf, tennis, lacrosse, cricket, boat- 
ing, tramping, bicycling, gymnastics, track 
athletics, and field sports—these are but 
a few of the innumerable legitimate 
recreations of clean young men. Billiards 
in a private house are as proper as chess, 
but the associations of the game are in 
such large part bad, that I think most 
young men prefer to stay away from the 
public places where it is played, and to 
let it alone unless they can play it at 
home. Young men sometimes ask 
whether they should not go to billiard and 
pool rooms in their home towns fof the 


His Amusements 171 


sake of retaining or securing influence 
over other men who go there. It is con- 
ceivable that a man might do this; but 
the chances are that he could acquire a 
better influence in other ways without 
running the risk of impairing his influ- 
ence, which he certainly runs in frequent- 
ing such places as these are in most towns. 

Young men may go into clean games 
without hesitation and with the greatest 
zest and abandon. The higher a man’s 
principles the better fitted is he for sport. 
The supreme law of sport is fairness 
and courtesy. All dishonesty, trickery, 
knavery, and crookedness, are contempt- 
ible and unallowable. There is nothing 
whatever either disgraceful or lamentable 
in fair defeat, and there is nothing that 
is not lamentable and disgraceful in foul 
play. 

Athletic sports are valuable physically. 
Some men are not physically fitted for 
some games. Many men cannot play 
football or row in races, and young men 
who have any reason to be doubtful about 
their endurance ought not to take up vio- 


172 A Young Man’s Questions 


lent exercise without consulting a good 
physician. But there is scarcely any 
young man who cannot find some sport 
suited to him, and he ought to find it. 
Games are good for the relaxation and 
invigoration of them, and even more for 
the discipline and training of them. 
Games that require team-play breed self- 
restraint, obedience, alertness of mind, 
corporate discipline. A good football 
team is a school of character, or ought 
to be. 

Looking back over history, it is un- 
deniable that struggle and warfare have 
been allowed and overruled—not to speak 
in other terms—in the providential educa- 
tion of man to provide certain absolutely 
necessary discipline. “‘ War both needs 
and generates certain virtues,’ says Mr. 
Bagehot, “ not the highest, but what may 
be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, 
veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit 
of discipline. . . . Conquest is the mis- 
sionary of valour, and the hard impact of 
military virtues beats meanness out of the 
world. . . . No one should be sur- 


His Amusements 173 


prised at the prominence given to war. 
We are dealing with early ages; nation: 
making is the occupation of man in these 
ages, and it is war that makes nations.” 
We rightly lament war, and fear its terri~ 
ble evils, but it is undeniable that God has, 
allowed it to fill a large place in the educa~ 
tion of the race. 

Now what war has done in the develop~ 
ment of the nations, athletics are meant to 
do in the development of the boy whose 
life is a summary of all human history. 
They are intended to beat meanness out of 
him, to create a spirit of rigid discipline 
in his life, to knit his body into tight com- 
pactness and fit it for stern and testing 
use; to develop in him a hard manliness, 
to root weak and shirking impulses out 
of him, and to drill all brave and danger- 
welcoming impulses into habits of hard 
work, and the will to accept any task, 
however nauseous, and do it with a whole 
soul. Unorganised athletics may not do 
all of these things for a boy, but the de- 
veloped, rightly directed athletics of school 
and college life, with their training, coach- 


174 A Young Man’s Questions 


ing and team-play, tend to do these very 
things for the individual as truly as na- 
tional struggle has done them for nations. 

For many boys this is the best discipline 
they ever get in their education. They do 
not know what discipline is at home. 
Parents give little attention to them, and 
scarcely know them. They grow up with 
wills untrained and lives unaware of the 
power of quick obedience. Doubtless 
home discipline can be carried too far, but 
the powerful nations have been those 
where it has been strongest. “In a Ro- 
man family,” to quote Mr. Bagehot again, 
“the boys, from the time of their birth, 
were held to a domestic despotism, which 
well prepared them for a subjection in 
after life to a military discipline, a mili- 
tary drill, and a military despotism. They 
were ready to obey their generals because 
they were compelled to obey their fathers ; 
they conquered the world in manhood 
because as children they were bred in 
homes where the tradition of passionate 
valour was steadied by the habit of im- 
placable order.” Thousands of modern 


His Amusements 175 


boys have never known anything approxi- 
mating such discipline. They are wilful 
and often overbearing, while they are 
utterly incapable of ruling or guiding 
others, having never learned themselves 
to obey. Properly controlled athletics 
teach them to obey. 

Parents are unwise who fear athletics 
for their boys, provided their sports are 
watched and wisely regulated. In choos- 
ing schools for their sons, they act fool- 
ishly in preferring schools where athletics 
are discouraged, or allowed to take care 
of themselves. Most schools do best for 
character which do not neglect this most 
effective way of developing it. 

It may be admitted at once that there 
are dangers, great in proportion to the 
power of athletics as an educational force. 
The war metaphors, and the idea of com- 
petition and conflict, can be carried too 
far. The conception of life as made up of 
quick, decisive struggles, as settled by iso- 
lated battles and sudden conquests, is not 
true. “The military habit,” says Mr. 
Bagehot, “ makes man think far too much 


176 A Young Man’s Questions 


of definite action, and far too little of 
brooding meditation. Life is not a set 
campaign, but an irregular work, and the 
main forces in it are not overt resolu- 
tions, but latent and _ half-involuntary 
promptings. The mistake of military 
ethics is to exaggerate the conception of 
discipline, and so to present the moral 
force of the will in a barer form than it 
ever ought to take. Military morals can 
direct the ax to cut down the tree, but it 
knows nothing of the great force by 
which the forest grows.” 

The ideal of victory, also, is liable to 
become, just as it does in war, an end 
irrespective of the merits of the struggle. 
Boys play not for excellence, but for su- 
premacy. The aim of the contest is to 
win, whether you deserve to or not, and 
to be disappointed or elated, not with 
the manner of play, but with its issue. 
A great deal of our athletic life is spoiled 
in this way. Parents should choose schools 
where athletic excellence, and not the de- 
feat of an adversary, is the first thing. 

Sport is spoiled when victory and not 


His Amusements 177 


excellence is made the end and dominat- 
ing principle. When men are disappoint- 
ed because they do not win, even if they 
don’t deserve to win, they do not have 
the true spirit of right sport. In games 
where individuals are matched, the de- 
light of the thing is destroyed if men do 
not play in generous attempt, each to do 
his best, but rejoicing whichever man’s 
best is shown to be superior. One great 
defect of intercollegiate athletics is this 
spirit of play for victory’s sake alone. If 
the other team is better, it ought to win, 
and the losers ought to rejoice to see it 
win as it should. What does the victory 
amount to, after all? The moral educa- 
tion and the general exhilaration of the 
contest and the physical good of it are 
the real things. Wrong standards here 
will exercise a vitiating influence over the 
whole life. 

And there are many grave evils closely 
associated with athletics. One is gam- 
bling. Another is professionalism, or the 
interest of boys in professional athletics, 
from baseball to prize-fighting. Another is 


178 A Young Man’s Questions 


the excessive development of the matter of 
prizes,—cups and medals, etc. The Greeks 
did better in making the sign of victory an 
olive wreath, having no intrinsic value 
at all. Inter-collegiate contests and games 
between schools also break into regular 
work and the quiet orderliness of life. 
They have their useful and pleasant fea- 
tures, but they too often furnish favour- 
able atmosphere for temptation, foster 
common and unworthy companionships, 
and give to athletics a place in thought and 
conversation to which they are not en- 
titled. It is best to select for a boy a 
school whose masters are not afraid to 
deal with such matters with a firm hand. 

On the other hand, abuses and evils 
should not lead parents whose own child- 
hood was before the development of mod~ 
ern athletics to forbid or discourage them. 
They are good for the body. The acci- 
dents are few. Boys are all the better 
for the roughness of the sport, provided 
it is fair and manly. Many a weak boy 
has been made into a tough-fibred, iron- 
nerved man by the overhauling he has got 


His Amusements 179 


in football and other such games. The 
body has its rights in this matter. Even de- 
voted James Brainard Taylor put it above 
mind. And athletics are good for more 
than the body. They teach self-govern- 
ment, obedience, quickness of action, fear- 
lessness, silence. They demand, as Presi- 
dent Walker said, “steadiness of nerve, 
quickness of apprehension, coolness, re- 
sourcefulness, self-knowledge, self-reli- 
ance, subordination of the individual 
forces to combination,—qualities useful, 
and in some professions indispensable.” 
And they supply a frequent occasion for 
enthusiasm, which makes life more 
hearty, and reacts wholesomely on all its 
tastes and judgments. 

Athletics have no right to the first place. 
Sometimes they get into the first place. 
Whenever they are there in any school, 
that is a good time not to send a boy to 
that school. And when athletic success 
becomes more honoured and esteemed 
than the success of high character or 
general ability, the line of excess has 
been crossed. 


180 A Young Man’s Questions 


Fathers should share the athletic life 
of their sons. They should live in the 
open air with them as much as they can. 
Camping out, or any simple life on the 
face of nature, is one of the best moral 
tonics and correctives. The artificial in- 
vented games will be more likely to help, 
and less likely to harm, the spirit of a 
boy who “‘in the love of nature holds com- 
munion with her visible forms,” who 
knows the trees and birds and animals 
of the woods. Surely the abundant life 
of Christ includes all the hearty, whole- 
some life of His world; and fathers and 
sons are meant to share it, and be, in 
work and play, just boys together. If 
a father wants to be his boy’s hero and 
friend, he must open his life to his boy, 
and be willing to enter the opened life 
of the boy. I asked eighteen boys once 
who their living heroes were. Not one 
mentioned his father. Some named 
athletes of their acquaintance; one, his 
brother, a football player at Yale. I 
think some would have named _ their 
fathers if their fathers had been a part 


His Amusements 181 


of their heroic—that is, their athletic— 
life. 

Ought a young man to kill things for 
sport? Well, he certainly will not shoot 
pigeons or doves just for fun. The laws 
of some States already forbid pigeon- 
shooting contests. But wherein is the 
difference between this and hunting 
game in the woods? There are many 
obvious differences, and I do not believe 
that hunting’ wild game for the sake of 
the sport, provided the sport is not 
simply cruel and wasteful, is wrong. At 
the same time, it becomes each year 
harder to do it, and many men take more 
and more to fishing instead. The gospels 
cast a sanction over fishing that confirms 
an inward sense, not of its justifiability 
alone, but also of its real uses. It is 
maintained by some that the fish do not 
suffer pain as we conceive it, and whether 
this is true or not, surely it is right to 
take them for food. If other ends than 
nourishment of the body are secured in 
fishing, so much the better. “ Fishin’ 
Jimmy ” makes out his case—at least, to 


182 A Young Man’s Questions 


the satisfaction of all fishermen. And 
what are all hothouse pleasures in com- 
parison with the great woods, the con- 
stant babble of the stream, and the flash 
of the trout in the sunlight? 

Or, if we shrink from taking life at 
all, as we nobly may, how rich is the in- 
terest of studying it! Many books have 
appeared in the last ten years, written 
by men who loved nature and all of the 
creatures of the wood and field and air 
and sea, which suggest to young men 
how much is to be gained from following 
the life of beast and bird and all crea- 
’ tures. It is good to have a special branch 
of study in science or natural history as 
a stimulus and enrichment. 

The word “amusement” in the popu- 
lar sense is not a very worthy word. 
“Whatever amuses,” says Crabbe, 
“serves to kill time, to lull the faculties, 
and to banish reflection.””’ And Phillips, 
in “ The New World of Words,” defines 
“to amuse” as “ to stop or stay one with 
a trifling story, to make him lose his time, 
to feed with vain expectations.” Surely, if 


His Amusements 183 


this is all that amusement is, we cannot 
afford to tolerate it in life. The killing 
of time is one of the most terribly unjus- 
tifiable forms of murder. We have no 
time to destroy. The oniy amusements 
that are legitimate must have something 
more to say for themselves. Most games 
of cards do not have anything more to 
say than this, and condemn themselves 
for their inanity when they are not con- 
demned by their easy lending of them= 
selves to gambling and triviality. 

Amusements should be truly profitable 
and helpful, promoting good fellowship, 
physical development, love of clean life, 
and knowledge of nature and man. 
There is no room for evil amusement or 
for any of that recklessness which is de- 
scribed but not justified by calling it 
‘““ sowing wild oats.” ‘‘ Boys,” said Josh 
Billings, ‘‘if you want a sure crop and 
a big yield, sow wild oats.” Young men, 
of all men, are the men who have no busi- 
ness touching wild oats. 

As Ruskin said to the students of the 
Royal Military College at Woolwich: 


184 A Young Man’s Questions 


“And now remember, you soldier 
youths, who are thus in every way the 
hope of your country, or must be if she 
have any hope; remember that your fit- 
ness for all future trust depends on what 
you are now. No good soldier in his old 
age was ever careless or indolent in his 
youth. . . . I challenge you in all his- 
tory to find a record of a good soldier 
who was not grave and reverent in his 
youth. And, in general, I have no pa- 
tience with people who talk about the 
thoughtlessness of youth indulgently. I 
had infinitely rather hear of thoughtless 
old age, and the indulgence due to that. 
When a man has done his work and noth- 
ing can any way be materially altered in 
- his fate, let him forget his toil and jest 
with his fate if he will; but what excuse 
can you find for wilfulness of thought 
at the very time when every crisis of 
future fortune hangs on your decisions? 
A youth thoughtless! when all the happi- 
ness of his home forever depends on the 
chances or the passions of an hour! A! 
youth thoughtless! when the career of all 


His Amusements 185 


his days depends on the opportunity of 
a moment! A youth thoughtless! when 
his every act is a foundation stone of 
future conduct and every imagination a 
fountain of life or death! Be thought- 
less in any after years rather than now 
—though there is only one place where 
a man may be nobly thoughtless; his 
deathbed. No thinking should ever be 
left to be done there.” 

From the weary and wretched harvest 
of the crop which must inevitably follow 
sowing wild oats, every young man 
should pray for deliverance, and seek for 
it by clean pleasures and those recrea- 
tions and amusements which clarify the 
mind, strengthen the body, and help the 
spirit in its warfare. In such joys peace 
and comfort abide. The man who is 
Christian in his play as well as his work 
is, after all, the happiest man. He has 
the promise of the life to come, and also 
the best of the life that now is. 


XIII 


MEN AND WOMEN 


Every young man should act toward 
women as he would wish other men to 
act toward his mother or his sister. This 
is a simple sort of rule, but it is searching 
and severe. It at once destroys all pallia- 
tion of selfish or questionable conduct, 
and it supplies a principle of action which 
will guide the young man in a sphere 
of life where many problems arise, and 
where, accordingly, his character is put 
to exacting test. A familiar, presuming 
or low-minded view will lead men to do 
things which no man will do, who thinks 
of all women with the reverence and re- 
gard with which he thinks of his mother, 
and with which he would want all men 
to think of his sister. It is significant 
that even the man of most bestial nature 
resents any reflection upon his mother, 
and has, therefore, in him the elements 

186 


Men and Women 187 


of a principle which should guide him in 
all his relations to other women. A gen- 
eral rule of action like this is of great 
value. It is practically universally appli- 
cable. It is easy to keep in mind. It 
commends itself to our deepest con- 
science. 

Such a principle settles at once such 
questions as our duty in railroad trains 
and street cars, in the matter of giving 
up seats to women. We should want any 
man to give his seat to our mother or sis- 
ter; just as we should give our seat to 
our mother or sister. Every woman is 
related to some man, and we ought to do 
for her what we would wish him to do 
for anyone so related to us. No question 
is raised here of rights, or of comparative 
weakness, or of courtesy. The whole 
question is settled summarily for us by 
the general rule which I have stated, and 
which appeals to every man. 

At the same time, the question of gen- 
tlemanly courtesy does enter. A man 
Owes more to a woman than he owes to 
aman. The talk of our day about equal 


188 A Young Man's Questions 


rights and privileges, much of it useful 
and necessary and some of it foolish and 
injurious, must not blind men to the fact 
that, even when all unjust disabilities 
have been removed from woman, and all 
her proper rights are fully secured to 
her, she still will be a woman, and there- 
fore never can be put by gentlemen on 
their level. She will be treated by them 
as entitled to more than any other gentle- 
man can claim. Men say often, “ Well, 
women are living just as men. They 
go to business and come from business, 
and work in the same office with us. 
They are to be treated just as men, and 
there is no more reason for my giving my 
seat to them in cars than for giving it to 
men.” Yes, there is the reason that they 
still are women, and that a gentleman 
must still treat them with chivalry and 
unselfish consideration—just as if they 
were his sisters. 

It is true that many women are coarse, 
selfish, and inconsiderate. It is not pleas- 
ant to a man to give his seat to a woman 
who, at the first opportunity, spreads out 


Men and Women 189 


over two seats, and refuses to make way 
for another woman, however weary and 
needy of rest. But such women are ex- 
¢eptional, and whether they are or not, a 
gentleman’s ideals are not affected 
thereby. Some woman bore him in pain 
and cared for him with a mother’s love, 
and that should make all women sacred 
in his eyes, and should entitle them to a 
share in the reverence and holy love he 
bears his mother. 

These ideals of reverence for woman 
for her own sake, and of considerateness 
for her as the expression of his own char- 
acter as a gentleman, must cover and 
control all of the relations of a young 
man to all women, old and young. It 
will help any young man to answer some 
of his questions if he will simply apply 
to them these principles. 

Of course, a young man will never say 
anything unworthy in the presence of 
women, just as he will never say any- 
thing unholy or unworthy about women, 
or read books which are unclean in their 
teaching or atmosphere. If he would re- 


190 A Young Man’s Questions 


sent any slander upon his mother or sis- 
ter, he will resent any slander at all upon 
any woman. He will not listen to small 
gossip, and he will see and speak of what 
is pleasant and commendable in people. 
At the same time, he will avoid and 
resist, in such ways as a gentleman may, 
all liars and all evil-mindedness, whether 
among women or among men. 

Men were made for society, but society 
is not what goes by that name. Card and 
theater parties, dances, small “ fussing ” 
devices, etc., are not entitled to appro- 
priate the good word “society.” All 
human fellowship is society, and for 
human fellowship, not for artificial ways 
of degrading it or making up for the 
want of it, we were made. Young men 
should go with people to give and get 
happiness and help. If their work de- 
mands the sacrifice of such society, they 
must make it, knowing that in their work 
they will find society. But nothing is 
farther from the Christian spirit than 
moroseness, isolation of life, or unsocia- 
bility, save the one thing of sin. The 


Men and Women Ig 


man of pure heart, of unselfish will, and 
of clean purpose and principle, can go 
safely about anywhere, but he will not 
wish to go where he cannot do good and 
get good. 

One of the questions that arises in 
the realm of a young man’s relation to 
women is the question of dancing. In all 
the dancing mentioned in the Bible men 
and women danced separately. If that 
were the rule to-day dancing would pre- 
sent no question to a young man. It 
would have no interest for him. He 
knows it only as a form of social amuse- 
ment with women. No fault can be found 
with “square dances” but four things 
are to be said about “round dances.” 
First, they distinctly lower the character 
of conversation. As a simple matter of 
fact they breed frivolity. Secondly, they 
are wretchedly indiscriminate. Too often 
in such dances the men who put 
their arms about women are not clean 
enough to be trampled upon by the 
women with whom they dance. And, 
when he is clean, how can a gentle- 


192 A Young Man’s Questions 


man find pleasure in doing in a dance 
what he would scorn to do if he called 
upon his partner in the dance in her 
own home? Thirdly, they do defile some 
minds. To denounce such minds does 
not justify dancing. And fourthly, in the 
eyes of heathen visitors they are unspeak- 
ably vulgar. Surely we ought to be slow 
to encourage what heathen regard as 
vulgar and indecent. 

The young man will never speak flip- 
pantly or frivolously of love. It is too 
sacred a thing to be dealt with coarsely. 
He will go on his way with a kind heart 
for all, doing his work, and minding his 
own business, not looking for some one 
to whom to devote his attention, or ap- 
praising young women as to their desir- 
ability. If somewhere there is some one 
for him to marry, he will come to her in 
time, and he will know it when the time 
comes. Then he must tell the truth and 
stand fast. A’ man’s word, once given, 
is given. Love is not a matter of caprice 
or whim, of transient emotion, of conceit 
dependent upon money or_beauty.j It is 


Men and Women 193 


the will to serve with the whole soul. 
We do not fall into such love. We rise 
into it. No man ought to marry or think 
of it until the love on which he rests is 
a love not of desire to have, but of desire 
to serve, and to serve forever, and to 
serve whatever the return. 

There are not two moral laws, one for 
men and one for women. The same 
standard of purity and honour is binding 
upon both. There is too much open or 
concealed belief that they are to be 
judged by different standards, and that 
what is unpardonable in one is venial in 
the other; or what is permissible to one 
is not to the other. Man and woman are 
not regarded as equals. Mrs. Stanton is 
characteristically vigorous in denouncing 
this, and what she regards as the conse- 
quence of inequality : 

“To-day, in our theological seminar- 
ies, our sons do not rise from their study 
of Bibles, creeds, and church discipline, 
with a new respect for the mothers 
who went to the very gates of death 
to give them life and immortality. 


194 A Young Man’s Questions 


Sons in our law schools do not rise from 
the study of our codes, customs, and con- 
stitions, with any respect for the women 
of this republic, who, though citizens, are 
treated as outlaws and pariahs in our 
government. In our colleges, where sis- 
ters are denied equal opportunities for 
education, the natural chivalry of these 
brothers is never called forth. The les- 
son of inferiority is taught everywhere, 
and in the terrible tragedies of life we 
have the result of this universal degrada- 
tion of woman.” 

Exaggerated as this is, there is a sense 
in which men and women are not re- 
garded as equals. And in a sense they 
are not equals. Women are entitled to 
' more consideration from men than men 
are. But they are equal in their duties 
to the moral law. The trouble is not 
that the standard for women is too high, 
but that the standard for men is too low. 
Both are bound to be perfect, even as 
their heavenly Father is perfect; and any 
lapse is as wrong in one as in the other. 
The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or 


Men and Women 195 


fall together, gain or lose. The young 
man who helps to lift our ideals and 
treatment of woman, helps to lift all men 
and lifts himself. The test of manliness 
is here: How do I bear myself toward 
all women? A man’s answer to this 
question reveals his character, and is 
proof or disproof of his self-respect. 


XIV 


HIS READING 


Next to the joy of doing good to those 
whom he can help, a young man will get 
his greatest pleasure in life from read- 
ing. Few of us have the privilege of 
knowing great men. If we do, we may 
be too timid to find out their inmost 
thoughts by conversation; and, even if 
we know a few well enough to learn 
their thoughts, there are thousands of 
great men whom we cannot know be- 
cause they have passed away. Through 
books, however, we may know them, and 
know them well. “It is chiefly through 
books,” said Dr. W. E. Channing, “ that 
we enjoy intercourse with superior 
minds, and these invaluable means of 
communication are in the reach of all. In 
the best books great men talk to us, give 
us their most precious thoughts, and pour 
their souls into ours. God be thanked 

196 


His Reading 197 


for books! They are the voices of the 
distant and the dead, and make us heirs 
of the spiritual life of past ages. Books 
are the true levellers. They give to all, 
who will faithfully use them, the society, 
the spiritual presence, of the best and 
greatest of our race. No matter how 
poor I am, no matter though the pros- 
perous of my own time will not enter 
my obscure dwelling, if the sacred writers 
will enter and take up their abode under 
my roof, if Milton will cross my thresh- 
old to sing to me of Paradise, and 
Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of 
imagination and the workings of the 
human heart, and Franklin to enrich me 
with his practical wisdom, I shall not 
pine for want of intellectual companion- 
ship, and I may become a cultivated man, 
though excluded from what is called the 
best society in the place where I live.” 
In all ages wise men have seen and felt 
this, and the young man is very foolish 
who does not soon perceive it and act 
upon it. Few things are more silly than 
the little social judgments and prejudices 


198 A Young Man’s Questions 


of most communities. Often good so- 
ciety includes many who have no 
thoughts, or, if any, purely trivial and 
inane thoughts, while many are excluded 
who have read the good books, who 
think solidly and independently, and who 
associate in the inner life with the best 
men and women who have lived. Young 
men should be strong enough, whether in 
the “ good society ” of the community or 
not, to choose for themselves the good 
society of the ages which is found in good 
books. 

It is good books which young men 
should read. They ought not to waste 
time and weaken their minds and char- 
acters with bad or even mediocre books. 
No young man should be so foolish as to 
give his time or any large part of it to 
reading the flood of ephemeral fiction 
which is now pouring on the world. It 
is simply not worth reading. Now and 
then a truly good book appears in it 
which he ought to read, but no young 
man can afford to spend time except on 
the best. “ Readers are not aware of the 


His Reading 199 


fact,” says Carlyle, “ but a fact it is of 
daily increasing magnitude, and already 
of terrible importance to readers, that 
their first grand necessity in reading is 
to be vigilantly, conscientiously select; 
and to know everywhere that books, like 
human souls, are actually divided into 
what we call ‘ sheep and goats ’—the lat- 
ter put inexorably on the left hand of the 
judge; and tending, every goat of them, 
at all moments, whither we know; and 
much to be avoided, and, if possible, ig- 
nored, by all sane creatures!” John 
Foster writes in his journal: “ Few have 
been sufficiently sensible of the impor- 
tance of that economy in reading which 
selects, almost exclusively, the very first 
order of books. Why should a man, ex- 
cept from some special reason, read a 
very inferior book at the very time that 
he might be reading one of the highest 
order?” 

Every young man should possess some 
books of his own, even if only a few. It 
is better if these are great books which 
have moulded his own life and marked 


200 A Young Man’s Questions 


perhaps the crises of it. It is difficult 
for anyone to mention the twenty books 
which each young man should have. 
Lists have often been published, but they 
represent the life-story of the man who 
made them, and his alone. If any young 
man is in doubt as to whether his list 
contains the books he ought to have 
read, let him ask himself if these names 
are among his authors: Shakespeare, 
Milton, Coleridge, Bushnell, Tennyson, 
Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Emerson, 
Thackeray, Scott, Browning. There are 
many great books besides the books 
which these men wrote, and a man might 
have read only good books who never 
read one of these. But whatever books 
we read ought to be good books. For 
“a good book,” says Milton, “is the 
precious life blood of a master spirit, em- 
balmed and treasured up on purpose to 
a life above life.” 

At the same time, it is good to read 
many different kinds of books, and often 
a book which may not live as a great 


His Reading 201 


book may be a great book for us. Ob- 
scure biographies, books on the smaller 
interests of life or features of nature, 
serve to widen our sympathies and enrich 
our interests. This is the row of books 
now standing on one library table I know, 
awaiting next reading: “ Two Centuries 
of Christian Activity at Yale,” “ Letters 
of John Richard Green,” Leslie Stephen’s 
“History of English Thought in the 
Eighteenth Century,” “The Speckled 
Brook Trout,” “Arminius Vambery,” 
“Life and Thoughts of the Rev. Thomas 
P. Hunt,” Clarke’s “‘ Outline of Christian 
Theology,” “John Hall,” Kidd’s “ West- 
ern Civilization,” Milton’s Prose, Coven- 
try Patmore’s Poetical Works, Stephen 
Phillips’s Poems, Fisher’s “ Making of 
Pennsylvania,” Streane’s “ Age of the 
Maccabees,” Thring’s “Theory and 
Practice of Teaching,” Gibbons’s “‘ Those 
Black Diamond Men,” Bunyan’s “ Holy 
War,” and some more. Tolstoi’s “ Res- 
surrection ” was there a day or two ago, 
but has now gone to the shelves. This 


202 A Young Man’s Questions 


list is a good deal of a mix, but it is surely 
good to read many different kinds of 
books, provided all are good. 

There are great books like Cole- 
ridge’s “Aids to Reflection,” Pascal’s 
“Thoughts,” Newman’s “ Apologia,” 
Lytton’s “ Last Days of Pompeii,” See- 
ley’s “ Ecce Homo,” and many others as 
unlike these as they are unlike one an- 
other, which represent great movements 
or impulses of thought, or stand out with 
some distinct and influential significance. 
A score of books could be suggested of 
this general type, each of which will break — 
open a new world of fact or thought to 
a young man, and give to his life a new 
and permanent power. 

Perhaps some of the young men read- 
ing this article would like to have the 
names: of some good books to read in 
different departments. I shall suggest a 
few which will serve as a beginning. 

1. History and _ Politics. — Green’s 
“ Short History of the English People,” 
Fisher’s “Outlines of Universal His- 


? igs 


tory,” Seeley’s ““ Expansion of England,” 


His Reading 203 


Bryce’s “American Commonwealth ” and 
“Holy Roman Empire,” Johnson’s 
“ American Politics,’ McCarthy’s “ His- 
tory of Our Own Time,” Reinsch’s 
“ World Politics,” Parkman’s Works and 
Bancroft’s, Woodrow Wilson’s, Andrews’ 
and Goldwin Smith’s Histories of the 
United States, and Woolsey’s “ Political 
Science.” 

2. Poetry.—Tennyson, especially “In 
Memoriam,” Milton’s “ Paradise Lost” 
and “ Ode to the Nativity,” Browning’s 
“Death in the Desert” and “ Saul,” and 
“The Ring and the Book,” and the 
pocket volume of Selections from Brown- 
ing published by Smith, Elder & Co., 
Emerson’s and Whittier’s and Lowell’s 
and Longfellow’s poems, Wordsworth, 
the two series of the Golden Treasury 
of Songs and Lyrics and the Treasury 
of Sacred Song, and Matthew Arnold. 

3. Fiction—Scott, Thackeray, George 
Eliot, Dickens, Hawthorne—these books 
belong to a higher world than that of 
mere story-telling. But there are many 


more to be added—books like “ Ben ~- 


204 A Young Man’s Questions 


Hur,” “Hypatia,” “ Westward hie. 
“Lorna Doone,” ‘ Robert Falconer, ” 
“John Halifax, Gentleman,” and “ John 
Inglesant.” And I don’t think any sane 
man need be ashamed of being fond of 
Kipling and Stevenson and Frank Stock- 
ton and Conan Doyle for lighter hours 
and the relief of the tension of life. 

4. Biography.—There are great books 
like Boswell’s Johnson, Stanley’s Arnold, 
Irving’s Washington, and a host of splen- 
did lives in our own day: Hallam Tenny- 
son’s life of his father, Allen’s Life of 
Phillips Brooks, Mrs. Kingsley’s Life of 
Charles Kingsley, Leonard Huxley’s Life 
and Letters of T. H. Huxley, Life and 
Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, and 
George John Romanes, Life of Lewis 
Carroll, Mrs. Cheney’s Life and Letters. 
of Horace Bushnell, Booker Washing- 
ton’s “Up from Slavery,” the Life of 
Robert Carter, and the exhaustless treas- 
ure of missionary biography—Patteson, 
Livingstone, Martyn, Judson, Hanning- 
ton, Chalmers. Many autobiographical 
stories are worth reading again and 


His Reading 205 


again—Trumbull’s “ War Memories of 
an Army Chaplain,” Hamlin’s “ My Life 
and Times,” the memoirs of Grant and 
Sherman and Hugh McCullough, the Let- 
ters of Chinese Gordon to his sister. 
These but make a beginning. 

5. Essays. — Holmes’ and Lowell’s, 
Emerson’s of course, and books like 
these: Lamb’s “Essays of Elia,” Bir- 
rell’s “ Obiter Dicta” and “Res Judi- 
cate,” Mazzini’s Essays, Arnold’s “ Es- 
says in Criticism,” Trench on the “ Study 
of Words,” James’s “ The Will to Be- 
lieve,’ Froude’s “ Essays on Great Sub- 
jects,” and Mr. R. H. Hutton’s essays. 

6. Some good books of general infor- 
mation covering the thought and devel- 
opment of the last century have been pub- 
lished, e. g., “The Religions of the 
World,” published by Harpers, and the 
book on the Science of the Nineteenth 
Century, issued by the same firm, to- 
gether with A. R. Wallace’s account of 
what the century accomplished and what 
it left undone. To these should be added 
such books, good for years yet, as Bage- 


206 A Young Man’s Questions 


hot’s “ Physics and Politics,” Guizot’s 
“ History of Civilization,” Brace’s “ Gesta 
Christi,” Uhlhorn’s “ Conflict of Chris- 
tianity and Heathenism,” illustrating a 
larger development than that of the last 
century only. 

7. In religion, many books should be 
read by the young man—Stalker’s “ Life 
of Christ” and “ Life of Paul,” Drum- 
mond’s “Ideal Life,” Simpson’s “ Fact* 
of Christ,” Phillips Brooks’s “Light of 
the World and Other Sermons,” espe- 
cially the sermon on “A Choice Young 
Man.” For some good doctrinal state- 
ment, let the young man read Hodge’s 
“Popular Lectures on Theological 
Themes,” or Clarke’s “ Outline,” these 
two representing rather different theo- 
logical points of view. To stiffen his 
faith in the supernatural element in 
Christianity, let him read Bushnell’s 
“Nature and the Supernatural,” espe- 
cially the chapter on the “ Character 
of Jesus,” and, for some account of the 
great movements of the last century, 
Tulloch’s “ Religious Thought in Britain 


His Reading 207 


in the Nineteenth Century,” and Rogers’ 
“Men and Movements in the English 
Church.” 

This is not a school-professor’s list, 
nor will it commend itself to the profes- 
sional reviewer. Doubtless it includes 
what some would condemn, and omits 
much that every young man should read. 
I have not mentioned Plato, Socrates, 
Gibbon, Victor Hugo, Motley, Prescott, 
Gladstone, Robert Burns, or any books of 
travel. It will suffice if the mere mention 
of these great books which have been in- 
cluded awakens young men to a desire to 
read the best, and a scorn for the waste 
of time of which so many of us are guilty, 
on Dorothy Vernons and Mr. Potters 
from Texas. 

Let us seek and keep the society of the 
best books. It is the only way to be- 
come the best men. And, above all other 
books, there is, as Sir Walter Scott said, 
one Book. Let us read that. 


XV 


A YOUNG MAN AND HIS WORK 
IN THE WORLD 


For every man God has a special work. 
Jesus strove to teach this truth to His 
disciples. He told them the kingdom of 
heaven was like a man who went away 
to a far country, leaving his property be- 
hind him, and to every man among his 
servants his own work. At the end of 
His life, after revealing to Peter some- 
thing of His future life, He met Peter’s 
natural request for information as to 
John’s work with the quiet reproof that 
He had a will for each of His disciples, 
and that that will was not the concern of 
others, who were to do their own work 
and walk in their own way. 

That the life of a man is of the pur- 
pose of God and not of chance, is a truth 
which our conduct may belie, but which 
our conscience must acknowledge. It 

208 


His Work in the World 209 


does not need to be defended or proved to 
a man who follows the Master who came 
to do the will of the Father that sent 
Him, and whose disciples “ are born not 
of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor 
of the will of man, but of God.” Noth- 
ing is of chance, or caprice or whim in 
the world where the hairs of our heads 
are numbered, and no sparrow falls to the 
ground without the Father’s notice. 
Least of all is a human life, God’s great- 
est and dearest creation, a bark adrift 
on an uncharted sea, or a tramp ship 
without master and commission. God 
sent us here as He sent our Lord. We 
are not above Him. It is enough for us 
that we be like Him. He purposes for 
us the fullest and highest ; that every fac- 
ulty shall be perfected, every talent used, 
every glory realised, every service done. 
That we should be the best we can be, 
and do the best we can do are God’s 
wishes for us. And these “cans” are 
not to be determined by our limitations 
and stupidities and failures, but by that 
power of which Paul was speaking when 


210 A Young Man’s Questions 


he said, “I can do all things through 
Christ which strengtheneth me;” that is, 
“all things which it is the will of God 
that I, Paul, should do.” 

Only if we do not choose to accept 
God’s high and noble purpose for us, we 
need not do so. Back of the great truth 
of our perfect freedom, God can take 
care of the contradictory truth of His per- 
fect sovereignty. He has told us we can 
choose for ourselves. If God’s taste for 
us is purity and our taste for ourselves is 
impurity, we may be impure if we wish. 
It is so with unselfishness and selfishness, 
love and lovelessness. And even if, in a 
measure, we are willing to give God 
some room, we still can choose whether 
it shall be much or little, whether we 
shall be wholly and outspokenly His, or 
only so with a good deal of compromise 
and trimming. Or even in His professed 
service we can choose our grade of work. 
“ Gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, 
stubble,” is Paul’s classification of the 
different qualities of work. Men choose 
the kind which they prefer to submit to 


His Work in the World 211 


God in the day of the testing by fire. 
Surely the best is the only worthy 
choice. No other choice is worthy of a 
man. We are not beasts that lower 
things should draw us with their lust and 
the higher hold no winsome attractive- 
ness for us. No other choice is worthy 
of our God—the Best. Serving Him we 
owe Him service of the best sort. Gold 
is the man’s choice, not stubble. It will 
stand better in the day of fire, and it is 
more square and solid and satisfying even 
now. But what is the best? Is the best for 
another man the best for me? Not in all 
things. God is rich enough to have a 
work for each man, novel and fresh and 
personal to the man. But no man 
is entitled to a better motive, a better 
spirit, a better sacrifice, a better suc- 
cess in the things which are really 
his of God to do than any other man 
may claim. The best for every man 
in anything that is within his capacity 
and sphere is God’s will for him. What- 
ever falls short of the best is contrary to 
the will of God. To go at all into the 


212 A Young Man’s Questions 


service of “the lust of the flesh and the 
lust of the eyes and the pride of life” is 
to fall out of manhood, because it is the 
choice of low and squalid things instead 
of the highest and best—the will of God. 

All this is quite practical. To turn 
from a good and instructive book to 
waste an hour skimming over a paper 
whose contents of value can be scanned 
in five minutes, is to choose stubble or 
hay instead of silver or gold. To spend 
an evening at a play or at cards which 
might be given to wholesome and stimu- 
lating intercourse with a thoughtful 
friend, or to some quiet piece of work, 
among men, is a surrender of the best. 
And in our work, to do things with 
slovenly haste or with moroseness or 
with any envy of others, is to come 
short of the best. And it is equally 
practical in what may seem to us greater 
matters, like the choice of our life 
work or occupation, our trade, busi- 
ness or profession. Which will really 
seem to us the best—that which will 
enable us to do our best for others and to 


His Work in the World 213 


be our best ourselves—when we view 
things not in the distorting light of 
worldly judgment, but with the calm and 
piercing discernment of that day when 
all work stands boldly out in its true 
character—gold, silver, costly stones, wood, 
hay, stubble? Let us be sure that in that 
day we shall regret it if we confuse gold 
and stubble here. God cannot come into 
the life of a man without bringing the 
best with Him. He is the best, and He is 
such a source of life and inspiration be- 
cause to touch Him is to be touched by 
the best, and to have all the possibilities 
of our life set a-tingle by the visions of 
endless capacities in Him. He ever 
longs to do such work as this in men. 
Men who choose the best, who worship 
in spirit and truth, the Father is ever 
seeking to worship and to work for Him. 

It is a useful and helpful thing for a 
young man to lay hold upon this truth 
early. His life is not a chance and pur- 
poseless thing, flung adrift in a world full 
of such derelicts. It is a divine plan, and 
he is to conceive of his work in it as a 


214 A Young Man’s Questions 


“vocation,” a calling. It is of this that 
Trench speaks in his little book, “ On the 
Study of Words,” which every young 
man should not only read, but study: 
“How solemn a truth we express 
when we name our work in this world 
our ‘ vocation,’ or, which is the same in 
homelier Anglo-Saxon, our ‘calling.’ 
What a calming, elevating, ennobling 
view of the tasks appointed us in this 
world, this word gives us. We did not 
come to our work by accident; we did 
not choose it for ourselves; but, in the 
midst of much which may wear the ap- 
pearance of accident and self-choosirg, 
came to it by God’s leading and appoint- 
ment. How will this consideration help 
us to appreciate justly the dignity of our 
work, though it were far humbler work, 
even in the eyes of men, than that of any- 
one of us here present! What an assist- 
ance in calming unsettled thoughts and 
desires, such as would make us wish to 
be something else than that which we 
are! What a source of confidence, when 
we are tempted to lose heart, and to 


His Work in the World 215 


doubt whether we shall carry through 
our work with any blessing or profit to 
ourselves or to others! It is our ‘ voca- 
tion,’ not our choosing but our ‘ calling ;’ 
and He who ‘ called’ us to it will, if only 
we will ask Him, fit us for it, and 
strengthen us in it.” 

This is the way in which a young man 
should look at his life. He has a work 
to do for God in the world. This dig- 
nifies and ennobles what we might other- 
wise call common and unclean. If we 
come to our life-task in the trust of true 
children of God, we may accept as true 
the words of John Tauler, mystic of the 
fourteenth century : 

“Every art or work, however unim- 
portant it may seem, is a gift of God; 
and all these gifts are bestowed by the 
Holy Ghost for the profit and welfare of 
man. Let us begin with the lowest. 
One can spin, another can make shoes, 
and some have great aptness for all sorts 
of outward arts. These are all gifts 
proceeding from the Spirit of God. If I 
were not a priest, but were living as a 


216 A Young Man’s Questions 


layman, I should take it as a great favour 
that I knew how to make shoes, and 
should try to make them better than any- 
one else, and should gladly earn my bread 
by the labour of my hands. There is no 
work so small, no art so mean, but it all 
comes from God, and is a special gift of 
His. Thus let each do that which an- 
other cannot do so well, and for love, 
returning gift for gift.” 

Every young man may find out God’s 
work for him. It would little avail us 
to believe that God has a work for us to 
do, if we were not sure that we can dis- 
cover it, and know it as God’s work for 
us. But how may we find it? First of 
all, it is a good principle to remember 
that He will not give any of us work to 
do unworthy of His character. No man 
can plead divine warrant for anything 
but divine work. A principle like this at 
once excludes the liquor business. No 
man goes into that business under divine 
assignment. Everything unworthy, un- 
characteristic of the holy God is barred 
to us as work for life. If we draw near 


His Work in the World 217 


to God, and feel and think in His pres- 
ence, all these appear despicable and un- 
desirable to us, and we are drawn toward 
the things that Jesus represents, and that 
we recognise as the Godlike things. 
Young men often make a mistake at this 
point. They are warned to be careful 
not to decide the question of their life- 
work under “ religious excitement,” but 
to wait until they are cool and self-pos- 
sessed. That last word is the betraying 
word—“ self-possessed.” What man is 
likely to decide for unselfishness under 
the cold, calculating spirit of self-owner- 
ship and self-service? The right place to 
decide the question of life-work is in the 
presence of Christ, when the heart is 
warm and the life aglow with the passion 
of self-sacrifice, not of self-possession, 
when we feel the beauty and duty of the 
life lived for service, not for self; after the 
fashion of Him who came not to be min- 
istered unto, but to minister, and who 
could save others but not Himself. 

If we can bring ourselves, with God’s 
help, into this sense of Jesus’ presence, 


218 A Young Man’s Questions 


and then look upon our lives, we are safe 
to decide upon our work on the basis of 
,God’s past leading of our lives, our own 
qualities and capacities, the need of this 
or that work in the world, and the oppor- 
tunities that are presented to us. Some 
will be drawn to trades, some to pro- 
fessions, some to commonplace work, 
others to work that men regard as pecu- 
liar and interesting; but, in any case, we 
may know that it is God’s own work 
for us. 

In this day the privilege and duty of 
the missionary work confront many 
young men. There are many whose lives 
are such that the question does not come 
vitally to them. The want of all opportu- 
nity to prepare for such work, or evident 
disqualifications for it, or other claims 
not to be disregarded, have exempted 
them from the duty of personal mission- 
ary service. But there are hundreds of 
others not so exempt. They could go if 
they would. They are well fitted for the 
work, with the exception of that volun- 
tary devotion to it which is an exception 


His Work in the World 219 


within their own power to remove. They 
do not go, either because they have never 
thought about it, or, having thought 
about it, do not wish to go. All such 
should prayerfully consider the farewell 
words of Ion Keith Falconer to the stu- 
dents of Glasgow and Edinburgh, before 
he went to Arabia for his too short work 
for the evangelisation of Islam: 

“While vast continents are shrouded 
in almost utter darkness and hundreds of 
millions suffer the horrors of heathenism 
and of Islam, the burden of proof rests 
on you to show that the circumstances in 
which God has placed you were meant 
by Him to keep you out of the foreign 
field.” 

All the work of a man’s life must be 
honest and sincere work. There is no 
place for anything false or deceptive. 
No lie, no theft, no gambling, no unfair- 
ness can be tolerated. Some young men 
will have to face the question as to 
whether it is right for a corporation to 
do what no individual may do. May a 
corporation ruin men where an individual 


220 A Young Man’s Questions 


would scorn to do so? Surely every 
right-minded man will be true here, and 
not deceive himself with the idea that 
what is immoral for one man to do be- 
comes moral when ten men do it. Few 
young men have to face this question, 
however. They are employed in simple 
ways, or earn their living in positions of 
inconspicuous responsibility. But hon- 
esty is as essential in obscurity as in pub- 
licity. God sees each man, and each 
man sees himself; that is enough. Even 
were it true that no eye saw, duty and 
right would remain, and their claims are 
supreme and inviolable. 

Whatever our God-given work may be, 
it is to have first place in our lives, and 
we are to do it faithfully without sparing 
ourselves. Few people break down 
simply because they do hard work. Most 
breakdowns are due to worry, or to neg- 
lect of sleep or of the simplest laws of 
health and diet. The man who sleeps 
eight or nine hours, who eats good food 
sensibly, and who refrains from all waste 
and sin, and who does not worry, can 


His Work in the World 221 


work as hard as he pleases, and be better 
for it the harder he pleases to work. 

We may be sure that part of our work 
in life is to be personal influence. In 
spite of ourselves, we shall be influencing 
others by what we are and what we are 
not, by what we say and what we do not 
say. Unconscious influence is a real 
power. “ Then went in also that other 
disciple,” Bushnell’s classic text on this 
subject, is a true suggestion of the power 
of one’s own behaviour to control the be- 
haviour of others. But, behind this, we 
are to put forth positive influence to win 
men to Christ and the Christian life. No 
plea that our work is engineering, or 
banking, or practicing medicine, or farm- 
ing can excuse us from doing this also, 
which is part of the work of every Chris- 
tian man. 

It is not to be regretted if: we do not 
do in our lives all we think we should 
like to do. If we are faithful, we shall 
do all that God had for us to do, and that 
will be quite enough and probably it will 
be far more than we ever planned for 


222 A Young Man’s Questions 


ourselves. Yet it is easy to mark out 
plans we want to follow, and each piece 
of work accomplished suggests other 
things to do. Sometimes, when we get 
toward the end of our work, we wonder 
what we are to do next, when as we come 
to what looked like a closed wall ahead, 
we suddenly find a new road branching 
off to left or right and offering greater 
possibilities still. We may be sure that 
this will be true of death itself. It looks 
like a cul de sac into which we are mov- 
ing. We see only the narrowing walls and 
the dead obstruction at the end. But we 
come to it, and lo, we see what we could 
not see before, the boundless ranges of a 
new life, with new work, new fellow- 
ships, new joys, new victories. We sing 
truly : 
‘« Work for the night is coming, 
Under the sunset skies ; 
While their bright tints are glowing, 
Work, for daylight flies. 
Work, till the last beam fadeth, 
Fadeth to shine no more ; 


Work, while the night is darkening 
When man’s work is o’er.” 


His Work in the World 223 


But it is true only for the present life; 
for beyond the coming night the morning 
waits, morning of the calm and eternal 
day in which, without dust or heat or 
tears, we shall look upon the King’s face 
as we do Him service. 


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